Mew-child
by NonAnalogue
Summary: She knew the legends, of course. There was, once upon a bygone time, a being born of the mystical Mew. Dark and terrible forces have arisen, and they threaten the Mew-child's very existence. Can Melanie and Repeat save it in time? (COMPLETE)
1. The Call

She knew the legends, of course. There was, once upon a bygone time, a being born of the mystical Mew – not in the same way that Mew was said to be the ancestor of all Pokemon, and not in the same way that men playing God created the cloned Mewtwo. This being, this Mew-child, was said to be Mew's direct offspring, its own flesh and blood.

Her mother had read her stories about the Mew-child when she was young, stories about the villains that sought its power and the heroes that stopped them. As she grew older, she began to notice that the stories all had one common thread: the Mew-child was passive, inactive, in all of them. "What exactly could the Mew-child do that made the villains want it so bad?" she'd asked her mother. Horrible things, was the answer she got. The Mew-child possessed power of a magnitude unknown in the modern world. "Then why doesn't it do anything in the stories?"

Because when it did act, nobody survived to tell the tale.

Her name, according to her Pokemon handler's license, was Melanie Cora Rylan; according to her parents when she was in trouble as a kid, it was also Melanie Cora Rylan, but with more bass in it; and according to her friends, it was Mel. Her license also indicated her height and weight (both slightly more than she would have preferred), the number of occupied Pokeballs she was qualified to carry with her at one time (six, with certain exceptions listed on the back of the license), and her trainer ID number (97532, one digit off from her lucky number, which she still hadn't gotten over in the eighteen years since she'd first gotten her license).

Her license didn't say anything, however, about what she did and what she was.

What she did was easy – she nominally worked for the Rylan Family Pokemon Shelter in Fuchsia City, where injured and abandoned Pokemon were cared for until they were ready to be adopted. In practice, this meant that she spent most of her time traveling the country, finding Pokemon that needed help and bringing them home. This was, in part, due to what she was: a low-grade psychic.

Psychics, while not common, weren't unknown; the Saffron Gym especially was notable for its large number of psychic staff. Mel didn't care to tether herself to a single gym, nor did she want to spend the rest of her life battling, so she used her psychic abilities – mostly manifested as emotions she could feel bleeding off of others – to locate Pokemon that were hurting.

It was an arrangement that had worked fairly well for years and years with nothing going wrong. At least, nothing that couldn't be fixed.

Then she received the call.

"Okay, Repeat," Mel hissed through grit teeth, "very slowly lower me the rope. Slowly. Please."

"You got it, chief." Repeat stretched out one arm and let the other end of the rope dangle from his grip. As he was currently wearing the guise of a Gloom, a species not well-known for their incredible reach, this meant that the rope didn't make it too far down the cliffside, but it was far enough for Mel's purposes.

Mel had started the morning intending to find the Magby that had been leading her on a chase around the outside of Rock Tunnel for the past two days; it wasn't unusual for Pokemon, especially injured ones, to be wary of her, but few of them had been as adamant about shaking her off their trail as the Magby had been. It was hurt, though, she was certain of that; it radiated feelings of sharp pain off of it that sent needle-stabs through Mel's mind. One thing led to another, and Mel found herself gripping an outcropping of cliff so tightly she thought her fingers would break through the stone. Water pounded the rock far beneath her feet, and she could just barely see the shape of the power plant in the distance and, even further past that, Lavender Town's looming graveyard, the Pokemon Tower.

Mel was trying very hard not to think about death, but it was coming naturally to her at the moment.

The rope, held at the other end by her Ditto, Repeat, just barely brushed her knuckles. Mel made a mad grab for it with one hand and let out a breath she didn't know she'd been holding when she managed to wind it around her fist a few times. "Repeat! You tied the rope to something, right?"

"Sturdiest tree I could find," Repeat called. He, like every other Pokemon, spoke his own arcane language, but Mel had picked up enough over the years to figure out what he meant most of the time. The psychic powers, admittedly, helped.

"Good." Mel tugged on the rope and swung her legs in, planting her feet on the side of the cliff. Her boots, which wouldn't have looked out of place in a war zone, didn't slide one inch. She sucked in a breath through her teeth, prayed that her glasses wouldn't slide further down her nose, and—

 _YOU._

The voice tore through her head, echoing everywhere all at once.

 _THE MEW-CHILD._

The world shook around her with the resonance of the sound.

 _FIND. PROTECT!_

Blackness enveloped her as pictures danced in her mind. A cat-like face, small and pink and soft. A barren island far away in the ocean, home to only a small stone triangle amidst sparse trees. A woman in a purple robe. Red letters, too blurry to read.

Then everything was gone.

When Mel opened her eyes again, the harsh, artificial light threatened to turn what was already a pounding headache into something more apocalyptic. She winced and screwed her eyes shut. The place she was in didn't look familiar, at least not from the brief glimpse she'd gotten, but the mattress under her, the sheets twisted around her, and the pillow that her head rested on at least all indicated that she was somewhere safe – a hospital, she guessed, after that fall.

Mel let the eyelids of one eye part, just a crack. The light flooded in again, but this time more manageably; the source seemed to be a fluorescent light embedded in the ceiling. She became aware of a quiet rhythmic beeping that, once she noticed it, was impossible to ignore, counting out her heartbeats. The room her bed sat in was far larger than she could see; curtains on either side of her sectioned her off from the rest of the people that were presumably in there with her.

Well, all but one of the people, anyway – as she opened her eyes more slowly, Mel could see, out of her periphery, a figure in the chair next to her bed. Her limbs felt heavy, most of all when she tried to turn to face the stranger, but her motion, feeble as it was, was enough to attract their attention.

"Hey there, kid," they said as they got to their feet with a languid motion. Mel got a better look at them: a woman, shorter than Mel by at least a head by her estimations, slender, spritely. Her face, elfin and pointed, bore a sharp grin and twinkling eyes, like she knew the punchline to a joke Mel hadn't heard. Her clothes were beaten up and ill-fitting, somehow incongruous with the image the rest of her presented.

"Not a kid," Mel mumbled. "I'm 28."

The woman sat herself on the corner of the bed. "Yeah, well. When someone does something stupid like, I dunno, straight-up letting go of a rope when they're hanging over a raging river, I figure a few punches to the ego are called for, right?"

Mel blinked blearily. Her mind wasn't firing quickly enough to pull apart all of the concerning parts of that sentence. On top of that, the woman wasn't even letting her guard down enough for her emotions to seep out. "Who are you, exactly?" she asked.

"Oh yeah, of course. My bad. Call me Nia." Nia made a theatrical sweeping motion with her arms and bowed, though, given her position on the bed, the only thing she accomplished was knocking away a stand with some papers on it.

"Nia…" The name rang faint bells in the back of Mel's memory, but she couldn't place why. "Why are you here? Just to take me down a couple pegs?"

Nia giggled and shook her head. "Nah, nothing like that. I was set up next door. Or next curtain, or whatever. I'm due to go today, so I thought I'd look around for one last time. You know, for nostalgia's sake or something. Looked through your chart when the doc wasn't looking. You know how it is."

"Oh." It was the only response Mel had the strength to give. The room around her felt bitterly cold, and she drew her sheet in around her.

"So what possessed you to drop?"

Mel grimaced. The thought of what happened caused physical pain in the back of her head, like someone had driven in an ice pick. "Was trying to find a hurt Pokemon. Fell. Tried to climb back up with a rope Repeat had… Repeat…" Two neurons abruptly connected. "Where's Repeat? Where is he? Is he okay?"

"Calm down there, bucko," Nia said, holding her hands up. "Guessing Repeat is your Ditto, right? Sounds like a Ditto-ish name. Says on your chart the doc has him in the hospital's Pokemon Center. Good hands, I'd wager. So finish the story. What happened?"

"Psychic flash," Mel muttered. The voice in the back of her head that ordinarily would have warned her against mentioning her ability to others had a bit more on its plate to worry about. "Need to save the Mew-child. Something like that."

Nia clapped her hands together. "Ah, you're a psychic! And you got a call for help out of the blue! Sounds like the start to some kind of mystical quest or some such. And I would know. That's the kind of thing that stories are made of! What's your plan?"

"Plan?"

"You know, like… what are you gonna do to save the thing?"

"Not gonna be any saving." Mel shook her head weakly. "I got better stuff to do than fall for some kind of prank. Probably some little kid, just got their psychic powers, playing jokes on anyone nearby. Me and Repeat, we need to finish the job then get back home and report in." It was the longest sentence she'd said since she woke up, and she had to take several deep breaths afterwards.

"Well, if you say so." Nia hopped down off the bed. "But be careful. I know it first-hand. When calls like that come in, they don't take 'no' for an answer. Best of luck to you, one way or the other." She parted the curtain and stepped outside of Mel's section, then poked her head back in after a moment. "By the way, your chart says you'll probably be good enough to leave tomorrow if you get enough rest. So take it easy! It's like a free vacation." Then she disappeared.

Then Nia reappeared a second time. "Hey, one more thing," she said, slipping back past the curtain.

"Can you stay gone so I can actually rest?" Mel growled.

"Nah, this is quick. Faster than fast, you know? Look, no matter what you decide, we live in dangerous times. There are cults and other nasty groups everywhere nowadays. Lots of bad people all over the place. Just wanted to tell you to be careful. You never know what's coming down the pipeline, and what they have aimed at you." Nia flashed Mel a wide smile, showing many more teeth than Mel felt comfortable seeing, then disappeared for the final time. "Be seeing you!"

"Hopefully not," Mel said to herself. She closed her eyes and drifted back into sleep amidst images of rockets taking off into the sky and men with swords opening treasure chests.

The next morning came and went, and true to her chart, Mel had been released, Repeat's Pokeball in hand. She kept the Pokeball closed until she reached her destination, all the while trying her best to shove down her memory of the conversation with Nia. It was too concerning otherwise.

"Hey, chief," Repeat said as he materialized on the ground. He looked well-rested, Mel thought; she had no idea what was inside the Pokeball and Repeat was not in a hurry to fill her in. "You doing okay? I expect we're heading home—" His words stopped short in his mouth as he looked around.

Mel gave him a moment to get his thoughts together.

"Okay, okay, chief. Boss. Partner," Repeat said, chopping his arm-analogues through the air like punctuation. "You wanna tell me why we're going right back to the place that sent you to the hospital the first time?"

"It's not the same place," Mel said, her hands on her hips and a smile on her face. She knew that Repeat knew what that smile meant. It was her 'I have a completely dumb answer to your next question, but you're still going to ask it' smile.

Repeat sighed and looked up at her with a furrowed brow that he had morphed for just that purpose. "What do you mean, 'it's not the same place'? I can see the cliff that you fell off of right over there. We're less than a hundred feet from it."

"Nope! That cliff is further back the way we came! It just looks similar here." Mel picked Repeat up and held him in her arms as she began hiking the other way across the asperous rock, winding her way between scraggly trees and scrubby brush. The sun beat down overhead, and the tepid breeze did little to provide relief. "We're about half a mile north of that. Our Magby friend didn't move very much over the past day. And it's still in pain – I can feel it."

Repeat let his eyes track upwards as they walked. A flock of Spearow, nestled in the boughs of an especially gnarled tree, watched their every move. "You, uh, ever considered that maybe the Magby doesn't want our help?" he asked. "I mean, if it only was on the run while we were following it, and it settled down after, maybe the problem is us."

"Don't be silly!" Mel patted Repeat on the head, making a faint squelching noise. "It's hurt, so we're going to help it. That's how it works. Besides, I think it's asleep now, so that'll make our job a little easier. This way!" Mel followed the Magby's emotional trail to an outcropping covered in a thick, thorny mass, overlooking the power plant. The Magby's signal was coming from underneath the brambles. "Okay, Repeat, do your thing," she whispered.

Repeat nodded and glanced around, scanning the area for any useful Pokemon. "Ha, there we go," he muttered. There, in the distance, he laid eyes on a black and white figure, climbing down the cliffside with agile jumps – an Absol, especially rare in this part of the country, he knew. He closed his eyes, and his limbs began to extend and enlarge. His body took on a more well-defined shape – something quadruped, with a distinct head and matching bladed tail. When he stopped shifting, he opened his eyes and shivered, shaking out his fur.

"Good eye," Mel said. "I didn't even see one of them around here."

"Because I'm feeling nice today, I won't make a crack about your glasses." Repeat lowered his head then, faster than Mel's eyes could follow, let loose with a whirlwind of slashes from the Absol body's abundance of natural blades. Before Mel could even scoot back, the brush was gone – and underneath where it had been was, yes, a small Magby, fast asleep, covered in the bruises that Mel suspected had come from its previous home. In addition to the expected collar that all Magby had around their neck, this Magby also had one around its leg, with a tag that read 'if found, please return to,' with the rest torn off.

Mel gently picked up the Magby and cradled it against her shoulder. "All right, Repeat, let's scoot," she said in a soft, lilting tone, none too eager to wake it up. "We need to get this little guy back to the shelter as quick as we can."

"Shh," Repeat hissed, looking out over the edge of the outcropping. "Come over here and check this out."

"What's up?" Mel knelt next to him. From where they were, they could see the power plant, pristine and gleaming in the morning light – and they could also see the pair of people skulking around the outside. The two intruders wore pale, nearly-white robes, with mantles long enough that they were almost scarves, and hoods that covered the top halves of their faces. Even from where they were, Mel could feel the emotions radiating from them – a heady mix of determination and anxiety, with fear and frustration seeping in at the edges.

"What's the word?" one said to the other in a voice that Mel had to strain to hear, even in the still air.

"The target's not around," replied the second, "despite the reports that it would be nearby."

The first one slapped the second on the back as their postures relaxed. "Look, I don't want to be the one who tells Degree that the Mew-child wasn't here. Let's go get a drink first, then we'll go deliver the bad news together."

"Agreed." The second of the pair opened a Pokeball into the water, revealing a Starmie whose jewel glimmered in the sun. The two of them clung to its back as it swum up the river as easily as if it were cutting through air.

"Ha!" Repeat let out a snort as he reverted back to his normal form. "The Mew-child? People are still lost in legends and myths over that thing? Please. Isn't that ridiculous, chief? …Chief?"

Mel watched the two go, a frown darkening her features. _They were looking for the Mew-child… and those outfits… What did Nia say? That there were cults around? She_ knew _. She knew all this was happening. But… as shady as she is, she was right. They're looking for a Pokemon, the Mew-child, and I bet it's not to give it some extra TLC. They're probably going to hurt it. That means…_

"Hey, uh, boss, you okay there?" Repeat asked, patting Mel on the shin.

"We need to beat them to it," Mel said.

"Huh?"

"We need to find the Mew-child first."


	2. Seven and Three

"Melanie! Melanie Cora! Are you ready?"

"Hold on a minute, Ma!" Mel hunched over the hefty reference book in her lap, drawing her legs up onto her chair – the plushest thing in her room – so the book was even closer to her face. Her glasses rested on her forehead, and she squinted at the page. It was a ritual that made sense to nobody but her, but she swore by it when it came to absorbing information. "She's always in a rush," she grumbled, her eyes flitting left and right as she scanned the endless paragraphs. "The Venomoth Festival isn't going anywhere."

"Point of order, chief," Repeat said from his spot on a beanbag chair that was, coincidentally, shaped like him. "If you want to get technical, the festival is only for the weekend, so it _is_ going somewhere."

Mel lifted her head and glowered at him, the effect slightly undercut when she couldn't quite see him and aimed her stare in the wrong direction. "I didn't want to get technical, but thanks anyway."

"Why not take a little bit of time to relax?" Repeat continued. "Go to the festival. Take a breather. It's been a week since we brought the Magby back, and you've done nothing but pore over book after book on legendary Pokemon. I think it's making you cranky."

"I am _not_ cranky," Mel said, icicles hanging from every word. She squared her jaw and slammed the book – _The Collected Journals of Septimus Reus_ , widely accepted to be the first and last word on accidental encounters with mythical beasts – shut. "As it happens, I was thinking of going to the festival anyway."

"Ah- _ha_!"

"But _not_ because you suggested it. The gym leader will be there. She might know something. Or at least could point us in the right direction."

"And you think she's cute."

"Shut up."

Mel's bedroom was the same one that she'd grown up in as a kid. She'd seen dorm rooms that were bigger. A desk and an overpacked bookshelf sat below her bed, the top bunk, with just enough clearance that Mel could read at it without knocking her head. Aside from that, a closet, and an amorphous beanbag chair that never left the corner, all she had was a window that looked out over the front of the building. It was tight in their home for everyone; the bottom floor and basement had been converted into, among other things, a reception area, a play area, and a makeshift mini-hospital, not to mention the pens and shelters in the backyard.

Mel threw open the closet door and dug through the clothes inside, coming out with a light jacket; it was the awkward transitionary period between summer and fall where it would boil during the day only to get a little nippy in the evening. The sun hovered right over the horizon, casting orange light straight into her room. "Are you coming?" she asked.

"Wouldn't miss it for the world, chief."

Though it had been created ages ago as a small event to celebrate a Pokemon that made its home in and around Fuchsia City, the Venomoth Festival had ballooned into a weekend-long affair filled with food, souvenirs, carnival games, photo ops, and even a Pokemon battling tournament. The winner of the tournament won the right to an official match against the Fuchsia gym leader without navigating her labyrinthine facility first; more than a few Soul Badge holders had gotten theirs through the festival.

Mel was old enough to remember when the current gym leader, Janine, took over from her father after he was promoted up to the Elite Four. Janine had been young when she assumed the role – she and Mel were only a year or two apart, and were passingly acquainted with each other thanks to their families' respective roles in the community – but in the decade-plus since then, she'd blossomed into a gym leader that challengers feared even more than the psychic Sabrina.

Janine's star Pokemon, though, was still Venomoth. Mel figured some things would never change.

"Your technique is good, but it's not quite enough! Venomoth, let's finish this! Bug Buzz!"

A harsh, grating whine reverberated out from the makeshift arena that had been constructed in the center of the festival, and most of the audience covered their ears. Mel was among the few that didn't; she'd been exposed to the noise enough that it barely registered anymore. Janine crouched on one side of the stage, her fingers pressed together in an enigmatic gesture; she was dressed in her full ninja garb, just as she was any time she was in public in any sort of official capacity. The challenger, an insect researcher who'd traveled to the festival from Johto, groaned as he saw his Leavanny collapse to the ground. It wasn't an official League match – only an exhibition – but Mel knew that Janine still had pulled no punches.

"Wasn't that amazing, folks?" the announcer cried, climbing up onto the stage to lift Janine's hand into the air. "That's our gym leader for you! Remember, if you saw that match and thought to yourself, 'I want to get beat by her too,' there's still time to sign up for the tournament! The opening match is tomorrow! The winner could find themselves in possession of a Soul Badge… if they can get past the poisonous ninja master, Janine!"

Applause echoed through the festival as Janine descended from the stage. Mel stretched and rose from her chair, pausing a moment so Repeat could climb up to her shoulder, and followed Janine away from the main festival venue. "Hey, Janine, wait up!" she called.

Janine stopped and turned her head, a smile spreading across her face as recognition sunk in. "Hey, hey, hey, if it isn't Melanie Rylan! It's been forever! Since, what, we did that commercial for the shelter together, right?" She let out a peal of laughter and held her forehead. "What a train wreck that was! Hey, at least we both looked pretty cool for it, right?" Happiness and nostalgia welled up from Janine's mind; as far back as Mel could remember, Janine's emotions were always pretty obvious to read.

Memories surfaced in Mel's head of the two of them dressed in identical ninja outfits. They were both sized for Janine, so Mel had looked rather unfortunately like she'd grown out of hers. Even so, Mel did have to admit to herself that she hadn't looked too bad otherwise, though Janine wore it much better. "Can't argue there," Mel said, offering up an altogether more hesitant laugh. "Look, do you have a second?"

"For you? Of course! What's going on?"

Mel braced herself. There wasn't going to be a way to explain that didn't sound childish at best and delusional at worst. "Do you, uh, know anything about the Mew-child?"

To Mel's surprise, Janine didn't immediately laugh it off. "The Mew-child?" Janine repeated, her hand on her chin. "Hm… I mean, my dad told me stories about it when I was little. Why do you ask?"

"Oh, uh…" _Nobody in town knows I'm a psychic, and I'm going to keep it that way._ "I saw some guys over by the power plant a little while ago. Weird dudes in robes. They were going on about how they were trying to find it. So I thought I'd do a little research on my end, you know?" Mel shifted Repeat to her arms and gave him a pat to head off the smart response that she could feel coming.

"Sure, sure. Hm." Janine looked up to the sky, where the stars, faintly visible over the city's light pollution, were twinkling gently. She snapped her fingers. "I may not know anything about it myself, but I know someone who would. He knows anything and everything related to mythology. Professor Silktree's his name. He's the one who founded the research center in the Ruins of Alph out in Johto. Word from my dad is that he's down in the Sevii Islands right now, though, so if you could catch a boat headed that way…"

"…I could maybe run into him," Mel finished. "Huh. That just might work. Thanks for the idea."

Janine beamed, flashing a radiant smile. "No problem! Let me know how it goes, huh? I'm curious now!" She elbowed Mel in the side. "Plus, if you need someone with some strength on your side, you know who to call. After all, you just got your Ditto here, right?"

Repeat narrowed his eyes and muttered something under his breath that Mel was thankful Janine couldn't understand. "We're plenty capable," Mel said with an artificial grin, rubbing the top of Repeat's head-analogue a little harder. "In fact, I—"

"Wait." Janine put a hand up.

"Huh?"

"Do you hear that?"

"Hear what?" Mel asked, but then she listened a little harder. It was subtle at first, but once she realized what it was, it sent ice down her spine and a matching spike into her mind. Coming from the direction of the festival, she could hear people… screaming.

"Let's go," Janine said, breaking into a sprint.

The makeshift stage had been crushed. No great loss, Mel figured, since it was mostly just planks lined up on top of cinderblocks; she was more concerned about the craft that had descended on top of it. It looked like its engineer had been inspired in equal parts by submarines and hovercrafts – a gleaming metal tube, almost an egg, large enough for maybe ten people, with turbines on either side and blacked-out windows encircling the whole thing. The ship hadn't actually touched the stage, but the sheer force of the air blasting from the turbines, swiveled to point downwards, had flattened the wood and the brick as surely as if a Snorlax had slept there.

Mel's breath caught in her throat as she tried to process what she was seeing. Almost as alarming as the craft itself was the noise it was making – or rather, the absence thereof. Even though it was hovering in the air only a few feet off the ground, it was barely making a whisper. _How is it doing that?_ she thought.

None of the fairgoers were around, Mel could tell that much. The screams and the pangs of fear had all faded into the distance. The police would be there soon.

The turbines slowed. The ship alit on the ground.

Neither Mel, nor Repeat, nor Janine moved, their eyes all locked in place.

An outline of a rectangle appeared in the side of the tube. A door. With a pneumatic hiss, it slid open.

Two figures stepped out. While they diverged in build and size – one was short and lean, the other large and imposing – they both dressed identically, in matching slate-gray uniforms of shapeless shirts and pants. They both wore messenger caps pulled low to obscure their eyes, bandannas over the bottom half of their faces, and darker gunmetal gray gloves. The only embellishment on either of them was a single letter, blood red, over their hearts.

Mel gasped, and she heard Janine do the same. Any Kantonian would know what that letter meant.

They both bore a red 'R'.

Janine's adrenaline seeped in at the edges of Mel's mind. Mel herself could feel her fingertips buzzing as the blood began pumping faster. The two Rockets hadn't moved yet – they stood in place, staring. She focused her senses on them, trying to pry loose what was emanating from their heads, but…

"What?" Mel croaked.

There was nothing there. No emotions, no feelings, nothing coming from the Rockets. Mel had seen people who'd built heavy psychological walls, keeping anything from getting out, but this was well beyond that. The two Rockets had… nothing.

It felt like an eternity since the figures had stepped down from the craft, even though Mel knew it had only been a matter of seconds. A voice, filtered through layers of electronic interference, spilled out of whatever receivers the Rockets were wearing. "No.7, No.3, confirm status."

The shorter Rocket lifted her wrist closer to her mouth and slid the sleeve up, revealing a simple gray wristband with a small transceiver on it. "No.3. On location. Aerial sweeps conducted. Primary objective not met. Cannot confirm presence of Mew offspring. Does not seem to be here."

 _Mew offspring…_ Mel thought. _They're after the Mew-child, too?_

"No.7," said the larger Rocket into her own wrist receiver. "The only presence here is JN-Beta. Gym leader. Plus irrelevant civilian and Pokemon."

"Hey!" Mel and Repeat growled in tandem. "Irrelevant?!"

No.7 continued as if Mel hadn't said anything. "Secondary objective still possible."

"Do it," squawked the presence on the other end of the radio. "Detain JN-Beta."

The two Rockets took a synchronized step towards Mel and Janine. Mel took a step back to run, but felt Janine's hand on her shoulder. When she turned to look, Janine drew a circle in the air, a clock, in what Mel understood to be shorthand for 'buy some time', winked, then… disappeared entirely, in a cloud of smoke.

"Guess the ninja outfit's not for nothing," Repeat muttered.

Without saying a word to each other, No.7 and No.3 diverged; No.3 sped away from the ship back towards the city proper before Mel could get in front of her. No.7 blocked her path instead and held up a hand that was, itself, larger than Mel's head. "Civilian," No. 7 droned, "we do not wish to cause unnecessary harm at this juncture. Stand down, or I will use force."

"'Stand down or I will use force,'" Mel repeated in a nasal twang. "Who do you think you're kidding? You're Rockets. Everyone knows about you. You live for nothing _but_ unnecessary harm."

No.7 shook her head. "Negative. We are not Rockets. Team Rocket is disbanded. We are Neo Rocket."

"Is that… functionally different?" Mel asked, unable to stop herself.

Repeat, still in her arms, smacked the back of her hand. "She's distracting you, Mel! They're trying to buy time too! Get out of here!"

"No!" Mel growled. "There's only two of them. Janine's gonna handle the shrimp, and we're not about to let her down. You and I, we're gonna stop this jerk in her tracks. Then we'll be able to hand them over to the police. Better than just letting them go!" She spread her arms, letting Repeat jump to the ground. He knew the drill, even if he didn't like it. "Let's go, Repeat! Do your thing!"

A click cut through the still air like a knife. No.7 held in her hand a Pokeball, a type Mel didn't immediately recognize – it was as gray as their clothes, with a single stripe of darker gray perpendicular to the divide between the two halves. The click was No.7 tapping the button on the front with her thumb, and in a flash of light – also, somehow, gray – a silhouette appeared in front of her. It was even taller than she was, and more than twice as wide; as it faded into view, Mel recognized the massive hands, the thick legs, the skirt-like protrusions around its waist – a Hariyama.

Repeat slid his eyes towards Mel, panic evident even in his minimalist face. "Uh, boss," he started.

"Repeat. Transform. We got this," said Mel.

"If you say so," Repeat said under his breath. He closed his eyes and began shifting his form, bulking out—

—until the Hariyama slammed a palm bigger than he was into his face, and by extension the rest of him all at once.

This was bad enough, but it happened a second time.

And a third.

And a fourth, and a fifth.

Repeat fell over backwards, resembling nothing quite so much as a puddle of jelly.

Mel couldn't will her limbs to move. All she could muster was to stare, open-mouthed, at the unconscious Repeat and the monster of a Pokemon standing over him.

The Hariyama disappeared back into its Pokeball, which hadn't even had time to leave No.7's hand. No.7 lifted her other arm up and spoke into the transceiver. "No.7. Civilian dealt with."

"No.3. Forwarding you coordinates. Bring ship. Have detained JN-Beta. Secondary objective completed successfully."

As No.7 climbed into the craft, Mel knelt on the ground, gently stroking Repeat. The words had gone into her ears, but she couldn't reconcile them with the thoughts that were bouncing around her head. _They… detained JN-Beta? But that's… Janine. How did… how did Janine lose?_

 _How did_ we _lose?_

 _What's going to happen?_

The airship lifted off the ground with the susurrus of its engines.

Mel watched it go.


	3. Genesis

The night had not been restful.

Mel could count on one hand the number of times she'd been in police custody overnight, and none of them had ever been pleasant experiences. It had only been her, too – nobody else was left on the scene, not even her family, who'd fled when the chaos first began. "I think I can recite my testimony from memory perfectly now," she grumbled to Repeat. "If anyone else asks me to describe what happened in my own words, I think I might actually, legitimately, kill them." She took a bite of cereal, her body running on automatic. She could barely even taste it, though she wasn't sure if that was her senses being deadened due to lack of sleep or if it was just that she was eating Wheat Cubes, 'the breakfast of flavorless champions.' "Or," Mel added after a moment's reflection, "at the very least maim them."

"Maiming's the better option, chief," Repeat said. He sat directly on top of the kitchen table; the Rylan family had long since given up the battle against Pokemon in the eating area. The newspaper he was reading was bigger than he was, and his journey from one end to the other to turn the page was exactly the kind of thing that captivated Mel's sleep-addled mind. "Murder's a harsher charge than assault, after all."

The spoon hung limply from the corner of Mel's mouth. "Yeah," she said, draping her arms over the back of her chair and staring at the ceiling. "But if I'm gonna go that far, might as well go all the way, you know?"

"That's definitely an argument you could make." Repeat slowly lurched across the paper, following the story that had continued from the front page. The kidnapping of a gym leader, as expected, had made national news, and the rumors that a revived Team Rocket was behind it were enough to nearly send the country into a panic. As it was, Fuchsia was already flooded with reporters and hangers-on, all eager to get their bite of the breaking-news pie. "At least nobody thinks you were the one at fault."

Mel's mind didn't shift gears quick enough. "Huh?"

"For yesterday, I mean. Yeah, you spent the night being interviewed by cops, but they know it wasn't you who kidnapped Janine."

"Small blessings. I don't feel too optimistic about them getting results, though." Another spoonful of bland cereal made its way to her mouth. "Help me out, Repeat. What's on our to-do list now? My head's not getting up to speed like it oughta."

"Broadly speaking, we've got two tasks."

Mel smiled. _Only two. That almost sounds doable._

"The first is, we need to find and rescue Janine from those Neo Rocket people or whatever they're calling themselves."

 _Okay. That's a little more daunting._

"The second is that we also need to figure out where the Mew-child has hidden itself."

 _Also daunting, but that's just research, really._

"And, of course, once we do that, we need to protect it from the Neo Rockets, those people in the robes from the power plant, and whoever else pops up out of the woodwork."

 _Great._

"Not to mention that even finding the Mew-child means we need to get down into the Sevii Islands and find the professor Janine mentioned, which is no small—"

Mel put her hands up. "Okay, okay, I get it. We're proper screwed, basically."

"Aw, don't say that, boss," Repeat said. He crawled across the table and patted her arm with a single pseudopod. "One thing at a time, right? I bet this won't be as bad as you think. Maybe we could go find some of the other gym leaders – I'm sure they'd jump at the opportunity to put the Neo Rockets to bed before they gain too much steam."

"No." Mel clapped her cheeks a few times, bringing the world around her back into focus as her mind started ticking a little faster. "No, we shouldn't. We don't know who we can trust. I mean, back when the OG Rockets were kicking around, one of the gym leaders himself, that Giovanni guy, was their leader. And there were always rumors running around that Koga and Sabrina and Surge and them were all sympathetic to the Rockets. Plus there's that whole thing about how they have to be really careful about what they do in an official capacity… Janine told me about it once a long time ago. It sounds like more trouble than it's worth, being honest."

"If you say so, boss. So what do we do now, then?"

"I'm gonna finish this cereal and that pot of coffee so I can wake up some more. Then we're gonna to go to Vermilion City and hitch a ride to the Sevii Islands. If this Silktree guy knows anything about the Mew-child, then we gotta assume that the Neo-Rockets are coming after him too. And if that happens, well, it gives us a shot at rescuing Janine, but otherwise we don't have a lot of options for tracking her down yet."

Repeat began the laborious process of folding the newspaper back up. "That sounds awfully optimistic given what happened yesterday, chief."

"Well." Mel let out a deep breath and looked out the window. The kitchen faced the backyard, and her parents were both outside in the morning sun, encouraging a Vulpix with a healing leg to take its first steps since its accident. "I'm not sure we've got much else but optimism in our corner right now."

In a country adrift in change, from volcanos erupting to graveyards being torn down for radio stations to radio stations being subsequently torn down for the graveyards again, the Sevii Islands were an oasis of inertia. Mel had never before been there personally, but she found it telling that her _Traveler's Guide to the Sevii Islands_ was largely accurate despite having been published when she was a child.

Knot Island (or, as Mel refused to call it, One Island) still hosted all of the major tourist attractions that her guide said it did: the volcano Mount Ember, looming in the distance; the Network Center, gleaming hub of technology; Treasure Beach, filled with hopeful beachcombers eager to be the next to strike gold. The temperature was mild, not quite as warm as it was back home in Fuchsia, and there was barely a cloud to be seen in the sky.

"I can see why this place is so popular," Mel said. "Wouldn't mind vacationing here—hey!" A tourist, one from Unova from the looks of it, shoved past her to get to the Network Center without even a word.

"Maybe when we get some time off, we pick somewhere with less people, huh?" Repeat said. "So what's our plan now that we're here?"

Mel didn't answer right away. They had stopped near the Network Center to get their bearings; Mel wouldn't admit it out loud, but she had underestimated the size of the island. Everyone had always made it sound like the Sevii Islands were tiny and boring, but then, she supposed, that was the issue with asking people who'd moved away from there. The town on its own wasn't any smaller than Pallet – and she'd been there often enough to know that Pallet's podunk reputation was wholly unearned.

They crossed the street to a modest tea shop, its elegant aromas obvious before they even reached it. Mel pulled a plastic chair away from one of the outdoor tables, sheltered underneath a pastel-colored parasol, and sat, bridging her hands in front of her face. "Not sure," she finally said. "I was kinda hoping that we'd be able to pick up a trail of our guy when we got here, but…"

"It's too crowded," Repeat said, keeping lookout from his perch on top of Mel's head.

"Right. I wouldn't even know who to ask."

"Why not check the guidebook? Maybe inspiration will strike."

"Can't hurt, I guess." Mel placed an order for a berry tea and spread _The Traveler's Guide to the Sevii Islands_ out on the table. "'So you've made it to One Island!'" she read aloud. "Ugh, I still hate that name. 'Oh, we've got seven islands, we're going to name them one through seven!' Shoulda gotten an art major down here, I swear."

"Don't get distracted," Repeat said, rolling his eyes.

"Right. Sorry." Mel cleared her throat. "'So you've made it to One Island! Congratulations! There's lots to see and do here…' yada yada yada… Mount Ember, Treasure Beach… Oh, I didn't see this before. 'Local tech-head Celio is working to get the Network Center online as an expansion of the island's Pokemon Center after efforts to build it in a separate facility failed. The site of the abandoned warehouse where Celio first tried to build it can be found on Kindle Road, outside of the town proper; Celio is on record as saying he gave up the original location after it was found to be sitting alongside an ancient burial site and that he, quote, didn't need that kind of bad mojo.'"

The waitress arrived with Mel's tea right as Mel's head snapped up. "That's it!" she yelled; the waitress jumped back and only barely managed to save the tea from spilling. In one smooth motion, Mel stood up, knocking the chair to the ground, grabbed the guide, and ran down the street towards the eastern edge of town. Repeat could only mime 'sorry' to the waitress the best way he knew how, hoping she understood.

Equal parts beachfront, ocean, and mountainous crag, Kindle Road stretched all the way from the town to Mount Ember in the north. Though still buzzing with people, especially visitors to the famed hot springs heated by the volcano itself, it was noticeably less crowded than the rest of the island. Mel supposed the terrain had something to do with that; if Celio hadn't bowed out of a facility there because of the supernatural, the difficulty in getting around would have done the trick just as nicely. The building in question wasn't too far out of the way, though; she found it nestled in a nook eroded out of the cliffside itself. Just as the guide said, telltale grave markers littered the area around it, looking only like oddly-smooth rocks to the untrained eye, though the half-dilapidated structure, all crumbled brick and corroded metal, seemed fitting, somehow.

"So when were you planning on telling me what's going on?" Repeat hissed as they approached the building.

Mel grinned. The sleep she'd finally gotten on the boat to One Island and her sudden inspiration at the tea shop had done a lot for her mood. "So it's like this, you know?"

"I don't know. That's why I asked, chief."

"Okay, slow up a minute. I was gonna keep going. Anyway, so this place is on an ancient burial ground, and the guy we're supposed to find is all into mythology. I figured, what better place to find myths and stuff than an old graveyard? Those kinds of places ooze myths."

"Huh." Repeat blinked. "That's… pretty sound, actually. I'm impressed. So we're going to…?"

"We're gonna walk in and, fingers crossed, we're gonna find him in there!"

"And if we don't?"

"Well," Mel said, "then we just leave and start looking somewhere else. There are seven of these islands, after all. Guy might be on a different one." With Repeat on her head, she approached the warehouse and placed her hand on the door, ready to push it open.

Mel paused.

For a moment, neither she nor Repeat said anything.

Repeat broke the silence. "You feel it too, don't you? Something's wrong."

"Yeah." Powerful emotions welled up just beyond the door, way more than Mel could attribute to any single person. She knew Repeat couldn't sense the same thing, but he'd always had a good gut instinct. The part that was really throwing her, though, was what the emotions were – hope, optimism, confidence, and underneath all of it, a deep, yet subtle, current of malice, nearly masked completely by everything else. "Maybe I won't open this door right yet," Mel said, more quietly.

"I think that's a good call."

Mel slowly took several steps to the right, careful not to put her foot down on anything that would make noise; she managed to avoid, in order, a twig, a discarded potato chip bag, and an old bicycle horn that someone had left there for reasons she couldn't fathom. Once she rounded the corner of the wall, she looked up and down the length of the building. There were no windows. Getting around to the back of the building would be impossible, she realized, from how it butted up against the rock; from where she stood, though, she figured she could probably make it to what remained of the rooftop. _It's a one-story building_ , Mel thought, _and it looks like there's places where it collapsed in. If I can get up there, I might could see what's going on, hopefully without them noticing me in the process._ A pipe ran up the side of the wall, made from sturdy metal that hadn't yet rusted all the way through. Mel ran a hand up it thoughtfully.

"Oh no," said Repeat. "I know that look. You're about to do something dumb."

"Am not." Mel grabbed the pipe with both hands and planted one foot on the wall. Even when she pulled at full force, the pipe, bolted firmly in place, refused to move.

"Are you about to climb the pipe?"

"Maybe."

"I stand by what I said." But Repeat nonetheless held tight to Mel's head as she scaled the wall.

 _The Collected Journals of Septimus Reus_ , the omnibus of essays, notes, and other musings that together chronicled the life and times of the famed researcher whose name adorned the cover, went into excruciating detail concerning Reus' encounters with legendary Pokemon – every single one of them accidental. As such, many aspiring trainers used the _Collected Journals_ as a guide, hoping beyond hope that, if they followed his missteps, they'd stumble across legendaries just as often as he did.

This was not the case.

The true value in Reus' research was in his comprehensive notes on what tended to put him in the most danger, Pokemon-related or not.

With that in mind, this is what Reus had to say on the subject of roofs:

"I cannot emphasize this enough. Stay off of rooftops. Trust me on this one. The first time I made my way up onto a roof, it was on an abandoned grain silo so I could better scope out any rare fauna in the area. Needless to say, I fell through a rusted patch and very nearly died via suffocation and/or being crushed in a mass of grain, which is a horribly undignified way to go.

"Or consider the time I found myself on the roof of Silph Co. I won't go into too much detail, but the guardrails there are woefully insufficient. Luckily for me, I was able to catch hold of a windowsill on my way down and only severely injured one arm. It didn't even require that much surgery.

"My point is that rooftops are dangerous. Please, don't. Just don't."

Mel had read the _Collected Journals_ , if 'skimming' counted as 'reading' – and it did, at least in her book. What she did not do was take Reus' advice to heart, classifying it under the alarmingly broad category of "it'll never happen to me."

It didn't happen to her. At least, not initially.

Just as Mel had gathered, there were holes scattered throughout the roof. She crept carefully across, kneeling next to the biggest one and gazing down inside. She could see into a wide room that looked like it had started life as a storage area for nondescript crates, most of which were still there, even if they had been pushed to the side. Simple wooden tables, long enough to seat at least a dozen on one side, were arranged in rows, and at every table, there were seated several people, all wearing…

"Off-white robes," Mel muttered. "So there's more of these guys."

All of the people at the tables, though wearing identical robes, were immediately different from each other; many of them even still had their normal clothes on underneath. Mel could swear that one pink-haired woman at a table right under her was the nurse from the Pokemon Center. Every single one of them, though, no matter who they were, were transfixed on the speaker at the head of the room, standing atop a table of her own.

She wore a coat, long enough to almost be a robe itself, colored a rich, lush amethyst. Unlike everyone else in the room, whose robes reached down to the floor, her coat stopped just short enough that Mel could see heavy combat boots, not dissimilar from the ones she herself was wearing. The woman's hair was cropped close to her head in a military cut, and it was pure white, even though she didn't seem especially old. As she spoke, she paced up and down the length of the table, her stride steady and even.

"That means our mission is clear," the woman said in a resounding, deep voice that reached the far corners of the hall, continuing on from some point she'd finished making just before. "What is our first goal?"

"Find the Mew-child!" came the answer, ringing out in unison from everyone else there.

"And our second goal?" asked the woman, pounding one gloved fist into the palm of her other hand.

The response came again, just as loud. "Exterminate the Mew-child!"

"Exterminate?!" Mel and Repeat both yelped. Mel physically recoiled, an action that shook the roof under her just a bit too much – and it collapsed, falling into the hall below them, taking Mel with it.

The fall knocked the wind out of her, but thankfully had no worse effects; with her eyes shut, Mel could tell that she'd landed prone on one of the tables. Repeat rested on top of her, seemingly no worse for the wear.

She opened her eyes, and immediately wished she hadn't.

What seemed like the entire population of the building had crowded around her, including the woman leading everything. She stood by Mel's head, her hands folded behind her back, with a grin on her face that she may have intended to be welcoming but only came across as predatory.

"Well, well, well," the woman said. "Members of Genesis, it would appear we have a guest."


	4. Degrees of Separation

If Mel had been asked a few weeks prior what words came to mind when she thought about weird people in off-white robes, "surprisingly ripped" would not have been at the top of the list – as it was, it only barely crept in at number 93 on the list, right above "open-minded" and right below "fantastic cooking skills". Nevertheless, two of the bigger people surrounding her had grabbed her, each taking one arm, and, with no apparent effort, had carried her up to sit on the table that the leader had been marching across only a few moments earlier. They loosened their grip and Mel yanked her arms back, shooting pointed glares at the two of them, plus anyone else within range.

As if to add insult to injury, a third person, much smaller, picked Repeat up and lobbed him at Mel, where he landed on her lap with a squelch. She put a finger to her lips as she sensed a smart remark welling up from inside him.

The woman in the purple coat parted the crowd with a wave of her hand and marched to Mel, planting herself squarely in front of her. "How unexpected. It is a pleasure to meet you. My name is Degree Absolute. I would say 'welcome', but I normally reserve that for people who don't fall in through the ceiling," she said, looking Mel up and down with the slightest hint of a smile.

"Not like I meant to," Mel spat. "Not my fault you decided to set up shop in a place that was half-destroyed."

"So much the better. Surprise visits are often the most fruitful. Now, as far as you are concerned, my would-be spy, I expect the reason for your visit isn't that you support our cause, hm?"

Mel narrowed her eyes and pushed her glasses further up her nose, endeavoring to make the motion look as disrespectful as possible. "Aside from what I already heard, I don't even know what your cause is. All I got is that you're some kind of weird group that's got it in for the Mew-child."

"Tsk tsk. How minimizing. There is so much more to Genesis. If you would?" Degree asked, holding out one hand, gesturing at one of the dozens of interchangeable people surrounding them.

"Yes, ma'am!" came a single voice from the crowd. Mel couldn't immediately see who it was. "We are a religious order, ma'am. One that venerates the holy Mew, ma'am. The progenitor of all that is living, all that has lived, and all that will live, ma'am!"

"Then…" Mel stopped, squinted, and tried to rearrange the words in her head. No matter how she ordered it, what she'd heard didn't make sense. "Then why, for the love of— why are you trying to kill Mew's kid?!"

Degree gestured with her other hand this time, picking someone else out from a different part of the crowd. This time, the voice wove up and down throughout their words, underscoring the person's advanced age. "Yes, ma'am! The so-called Mew-child is not holy. There is no divinity in its blood, ma'am. Any spawn of a perfect being will be imperfect, and so the Mew-child should be destroyed, so it does not wallow in its deficiencies any more than it needs to."

"You see?" Degree said. "It is an act of mercy."

"But—but—" Mel sputtered. "That doesn't make any sense! Didn't you say that Mew is the 'progenitor of all that is living' or whatever? Doesn't that mean that everyone's imperfect? Shouldn't everyone be destroyed, then?"

As one, the crowd shook their heads, apparently well-practiced in countering that particular argument. "This one goes to anyone who wants to answer," Degree said.

Hands from all over the crowd flew into the air.

"Hm, let's see… Galia, you can field this one."

"Yes, ma'am!" came yet another voice, this one definitely much younger than the rest – a child. Mel shivered. "All of the rest of us – humans, Pokemon, everyone – we are imperfect, yes. But we are made to be imperfect. It is part of who we are. The Mew-child is a legend. It should be perfect. And yet it is not. This contradiction is intrinsic to its very being. It cannot escape it. And so, it should be put out of its misery."

Icicle chills ran down Mel's back. She could feel the exact same emotions from every person in the room: an empty sort of elation, plus the unshakeable confidence she recognized off of people who could never be convinced away from their path. _Wait_ , she thought. _There's one that's different_. It wasn't Degree Absolute, who had all of the same feelings as everyone else, only amped up by a factor of ten. There was someone else.

Mel scanned the crowd. Then she saw her. A familiar face.

A familiar face that she'd last seen keeping her from sleeping at the hospital.

A familiar face that winked at her and mouthed the word 'now'.

"Well, learning about your terrifying sect has been fun," Mel said, wearing a manic smile. She clapped her hands together and jumped to her feet. "But I think it's right about time for me to hit the road, soRepeatdoyourthingandfast!" She tossed Repeat into the air and started running. Repeat focused his gaze on the biggest guy in the room and began shifting; before he hit the ground, he wore the guise of a man who, not to put too fine a point on it, could have cracked walnuts in between his abs. His strides were longer than Mel's and he easily overtook her, plowing through the crowd, throwing people to the ground left and right, and, most importantly, clearing a path. The door leading out was closed, but Repeat didn't even bother to slow down; he simply lowered his head and rushed the door with his shoulder, blowing it wide open.

"Good job, Repeat," Mel said in between breaths as they booked it away from the warehouse. She knew that if she looked backwards, she'd see a crowd of people that was altogether too large on her tail, and she suspected that even making it into town wouldn't slow them down. _They're probably all marching in time, too, because they're creepy like that._ "Saved our hides back there," Mel continued out loud. "You can change back now if you want."

"You don't need to tell me twice." Repeat used his chiseled legs to spring into the air; he shifted back to his natural state and fell neatly into Mel's arms. "I don't know how you do it, to be honest. There's something really unsettling about being human."

"Think they just call that anxiety." They ran past the tea shop too quickly to even savor the aroma and barreled through the tourists ducking in and out of the Network Center to send messages back home to their loved ones. Just past the Network Center was the dock, where Mel could just barely see a ferry…

…pulling away from the island.

"No!" Repeat yelled; he'd caught on to the plan as soon as he'd transformed in the first place. "We can't just sit around and wait for the next one!"

"I don't plan to." Mel lowered her center of gravity and started running faster. "Get ahead of me. Get on the boat. I'll catch up."

Repeat knew better than to argue this time. "Got it, chief." He shifted into the form of a Spearow he saw perching on a nearby rooftop and took off, making a beeline for the ferry.

Mel didn't even bother going inside the ferry station. She took one look over her shoulder, confirmed everything she'd been worrying about, and jumped straight into the ocean herself.

The common wisdom about the Sevii Islands was that traversing the waters between them was almost impossible unless a boat was involved; the seas were too rocky and choppy to be able to make it through them safely otherwise.

Common wisdom and Mel were not, however, on speaking terms.

Mel slingshotted around rock after rock, narrowly missing each one; waves threatened to push her completely underwater, but she pushed through them instead. Her glasses spun off of her face, swept away by the current, but even her nearsightedness didn't stop her; she could see a white blob in the distance where the ferry was supposed to be, and that was all she needed. The ferry had slowed down to a near-stop; she didn't know if they'd seen her or if Repeat had somehow convinced them to wait, but she wasn't about to complain. Powerful strokes propelled her forward, and in the back of her head, she made a note to thank her parents for starting the swimming lessons early in her life.

With a metallic thud, Mel slapped her palm against the side of the ferry. She trod water for a minute, catching her breath. She couldn't see the shore from where she was, but nobody was following her.

"Hey!" Repeat's voice came from the deck, and along with it came one end of a rope. "Get up here so we can leave, chief!"

Mel wound the rope around her hand, let out a relieved breath, and hauled herself up.

The Seagallop line of ferries were not large, at least not by boat standards, but this one was moving in the right direction, or at least a direction that wasn't "back to One Island," and Mel wasn't asking for anything more. After showing her pass to the conductor, she let her ponytail down and wrung the water from it, then fished through the backpack she kept on her back at almost all times for her spare pair of glasses. The backpack was waterproof; it only took falling into the ocean once to rectify that mistake.

With her glasses on, Mel could just barely see back to harbor. The amethyst of Degree Absolute's coat among a sea of off-white jumped out at her.

Degree Absolute was waving at her.

The meaning was clear: "We'll be seeing you again."

Mel sighed and slid down to the floor, her back against a wall. A puddle slowly grew around her as the water dripped off of her clothes. "That's two groups we gotta keep an eye on now, Repeat."

"We already knew we had to watch out for these guys, boss," Repeat said, once again wearing his own face.

"Yeah, but now we _know_ that this bunch is certifiably bad news. I didn't know what their deal was going in, but I didn't expect 'kill the Mew-child because it'll be happier that way' to be what we got. And you saw how that Degree Absolute woman was conducting them all like she was a teacher, right?"

"Yes, boss," said Repeat patiently, "I was there."

"At least now we're outta the frying pan." Mel closed her eyes. "Wonder if I can get a nap in before we end up… wherever we end up."

Repeat blobbed off around the corner, towards the stern of the ferry. "That sounds good to me, chief. I'm going to take a look around."

Mel didn't know how long her eyes had been shut, or even if she'd fallen asleep at all. A rustling of fabric and a spike of happiness in her mind brought her back to the present, and she slowly opened her eyes.

There was a face directly in front of her face, which jump-started her brain faster than the coffee she drank every morning. Mel flew up, wavering on her feet and only barely catching her balance. Once she had a chance to breathe, she took in the details of the person watching her.

She was small, and she looked like she might start laughing at the slightest provocation. Her clothes were mismatched and beaten up, and Mel realized that she must have been wearing them underneath the robe that she'd last seen her in. "Hello, Nia," Mel growled.

"Hiya, kid," said Nia, flashing a gleaming grin. "Fancy seeing you here."

Mel rolled her eyes and leaned on a railing that ran along the deck, turning away from Nia and looking out over the ocean. She could see a few of the other Sevii Islands in the distance, not that she would have been able to say which ones. "I should be the one saying that. What in the world were you doing with all those Genesis weirdos?"

"Do you remember what we talked about in the hospital?" Nia asked. "This is going somewhere, I swear, so don't think I'm over here blowing you off or something."

"I mean, yeah, of course I do. You knew about the bad juju that was brewing. You warned me about it." Mel frowned at some of the water running down her face and, in the light of the setting sun, began tying her hair back up. "Cults and other nasty groups, you said. And wouldn't you know it, a week later, I run into some kinda revived Team Rocket and these Genesis dweebs. So that brings me back to 'what were you doing there?' Only now I think I've talked myself into believing that you actually _are_ one of those Genesis dweebs, so you better start talking fast."

Nia pressed a hand to her temple and let out a bark of laughter. "You're definitely some kinda pill, Mel. Nah, it's nothing like that. I just hear lots of rumors. You know, idle talk. Happened to catch word of some real sketchy types holed up in the abandoned warehouse outside of town, so I snuck in incognito-like to see what was going on. How was I supposed to know you were in the area?" She considered that statement, then smiled and added, "Though once you _were_ involved, it was a pretty safe bet things were gonna start getting wild, right?"

"Yeah, yeah. Laugh it up."

"Look, I'm just glad to see you're doing okay," said Nia. "That's all."

"Well, I'm doing fine." Mel crossed her arms, still carefully looking away from Nia. "So unless there's anything else, sounds like we're done here."

Nia held her hands up and backed up a step. "Whatever you want! Just thought I'd check in after everything that happened. I'll leave you alone." She took another step away. "Be seeing you, Mel." Then she disappeared.

As the sun sank below the horizon, the ferry approached the dock. Mel hadn't moved from her spot on deck, watching the island approach.

"Hey, boss," Repeat said as he approached her. "I found out where we ended up."

"Yeah? Which island is this?" Mel asked. She could make out a few landmarks – a tower, as tall as the Pokemon Tower in Lavender, stood in the distance, and the island stretched out in the other direction towards what looked like a winding canyon trail – but she didn't know which island they matched up to. She didn't want to pull out the guidebook; she and boats had a spotty history when it came to books and the keeping dry thereof.

"It's Seven Island, from the sound of it."

"And what's the non-awful name for it?"

Repeat fixed her with a stare, but when he realized she was serious, he relented. "Quest Island," he said.

The name didn't mean anything to Mel; it wasn't one of the more famous islands. Chrono Island, at least, had a high-class, albeit exclusive, resort; Floe Island was notable for being the hometown of former Elite Four member Lorelei. But Quest Island wasn't ringing bells. _Maybe I could sneak a look in the guidebook really fast,_ Mel thought, but then she remembered the sight of her childhood copy of _Past Lives_ by Emm Dosent sinking into the ocean and decided against it.

Mel didn't have to wait long either way. Once the ferry docked, it emptied out quickly; there apparently weren't many people going to Quest Island. She found a chair in the ferry station and sat, motioning for Repeat to sit next to her.

"So. Quest Island," Mel muttered under her breath as she pulled her guidebook from her bag. She spread it out on her lap and flipped almost all the way to the back, past all the rest of the numbered islands. "'Seven Island, small even by Sevii standards, only has a few attractions; because of this and because of Seven Island's distance from the mainland, it doesn't see nearly as much tourism as the rest of the archipelago. Most travelers here visit the Trainer Tower to the north; equal parts training opportunity and sports event, it's host to a timed gauntlet of Pokemon battles that get broadcast out to the rest of the island through their local radio station. If you clear the gauntlet and make it to the top, you could win a special prize.'"

Mel made a face. "Surely that can't be it," she said, turning the page. "The only thing on this island worth seeing is a tall gym? Come on."

"They don't even talk about the canyon?" Repeat asked, scanning over the page himself. "That's odd. It looked like a major landmark."

"I didn't see anything… oh, no, here we go. 'The Sevault Canyon, to the south of town, is well-regarded by locals, but due to its harsh terrain, visiting it is not recommended. If you do reach the other side, you'll find the Tanoby Ruins, where ancient hieroglyphics are said to come to life, but much about the area remains shrouded in mystery.'" Mel flipped the page again. "And that's it. For real this time. Now they just start talking about some of the ferries the islands use. Guess we better find our way back to one of the other islands, because it's not sounding to me like there's a lot going on here."

"Wait, wait." Repeat waved a pseudopod vaguely in the air. "Something in there stuck out. What was that bit about the ruins?"

"Huh? Oh, with the hieroglyphics coming to life or whatever? Sounds like that weak flowery language they always throw into these guides when they don't know what else to say."

"Maybe… but what if they're being literal?"

Mel shut the book and arched her eyebrows. "Like, you mean, they actually come to life? What kinda cave drawings are… coming to life…" She slumped forward, resting her forehead against the book's cover. "I'm an idiot. Of course they're being literal. They're talking about Unown!"

Repeat made a motion that would have, on a body with fingers, been something like a snap. As it was, it just made a quiet squishing noise. "And if there _are_ Unown there, then we might find Professor Silktree there too."

"Because he's the guy who founded the research station out in the Ruins of Alph," Mel finished. "So he's obviously in the weeds for Unown." She lifted her head and stared at the ceiling, scarcely caring about the sterile fluorescent lights shining into her eyes. "There it is. All fits together. Looks like we know what we need to do."

"Don't worry, boss. How bad could the Sevault Canyon be?"


	5. Hyacinth

"Our eyes met! That means we have to battle!"

"It doesn't mean that at all! Get away from me!"

The terrain in and around the Sevault Canyon wasn't anything new to Mel. Climbing the outside of Mount Moon, rather than sticking to the beaten path that ran through it, had been worse, especially when she had run into the family of territorial Clefable. The series of Moonblasts that had followed had been visible from Pewter City.

The trainers in the Sevault Canyon, on the other hand – well. Mel was nominally a trainer in that she had her trainer's license, but her only Pokemon was Repeat. Actually fighting other trainers was something that happened only in extreme circumstances, partially because Mel didn't have the best head for battle strategy but mostly because other trainers tended to pack teams more balanced than a single Ditto.

As a result, when exploring places with a high trainer quotient, Mel relied on a method with proven results:

Running.

"You look like a tough challenger! I'm excited to battle you!"

"You're about to be real disappointed!"

Many trainers said that running from a match was poor sportsmanship, with some even lobbying the Pokemon League to formally penalize anyone engaging in the practice. If trainers locked eyes, they said, a battle had to start.

Mel never cared for any of that nonsense. In her experience, if she couldn't run from a trainer cornering her, usually a handful of sand or a strategically-placed elbow was enough to get clear.

"My Raticate is in the top percentage of—"

"I'll check it out some other time!"

Eventually, Mel made it to a run-down single-level shack at the southern edge of the canyon, the ocean within eyeshot. She found a spot on the wall that didn't look like it was about to collapse and braced herself, swallowing down several deep breaths.

If nothing else, her chosen strategy kept her in shape.

"Are you okay, chief?" Repeat asked, climbing down to the ground from Mel's backpack.

"I'll be fine. Just hold on a sec. Gotta catch my breath." Mel stretched her arms out behind her head, then cracked her knuckles. "Who woulda thought there'd be this many people wandering around an old canyon, anyway?"

Repeat turned to glance back at the path they'd taken. "They definitely were chomping at the bit," he said as two trainers, only just visible in the distance, challenged each other. The sky, already clear, grew brighter as the sunlight intensified – one of the Pokemon had just used Sunny Day.

When Repeat turned back, Mel had already clambered to the roof of the shack. "You still think rooftops are a good idea?"

"One time falling through a roof is a fluke." Mel shaded her eyes with one hand. "Anyway, I think I can see the ruins from here. There's like one each on a bunch of little islands out there, but they don't look too big. We just need to get out to the water and we'll be golden." She squinted and inched forward as far as she could without falling off. "Wait."

"What's wrong?"

"I think there's people out there."

"I mean," said Repeat, "is that so weird? There were enough people in the canyon, after all."

"People wearing all gray, I mean." Mel jumped from the roof, stumbling a little on the landing. "The kinda people who might have a red letter on their shirt, if you get what I'm saying."

"Ah. People of a… Rocket-ish persuasion?"

"Exactly. So you know what we're gonna do, right?"

Repeat sighed. "I know what I hope we're going to do. I hope we're going to sneak over there and monitor whatever it is they're up to. Gathering information might be our best bet after they smoked us last time." Memories of a giant palm slamming him in the face forced their way back into his head, and he shuddered.

"We could do that," Mel admitted. "But I've got a different idea. How about we sneak over there and start cracking heads? This might be our chance to figure out where they've got Janine, and if we beat it out of them, we can go save her."

"It worries me that you think we can crack heads when all evidence points the other way," Repeat said, but before he'd even reached the end of the sentence, Mel had torn off down to the beach. "This is going to go badly," he added, even though the only one listening at that point was a Cubone who'd wandered down to see what all the fuss was about.

Clouds layered themselves across the sky, coloring it an angry gray. Repeat watched as the first few droplets of rain hit the ground in front of his face. One of the Pokemon battling in the distance had used Rain Dance. "Nothing for it, I guess," he grumbled, shifting into a Cubone form for faster travel before following Mel's trail.

Mel was correct in her observation. Ordinarily, she took pride in being correct, especially when someone had tried to prove to her that she wasn't, but this time, the pleasure was running up against a heavy weight that had settled in her stomach. The Neo Rockets were there, on the eastern-most island, climbing the steps to the most intact building of the bunch. _It's hard to tell from here,_ Mel thought, shielding her glasses from the rain with her hands, _but I don't think they're the same two I saw earlier. Three and Seven or whatever. Stands to reason. I wonder how high up their numbers get._ "Hey, Repeat," she continued out loud as a Cubone trudged up to her side. Repeat didn't have any obvious tells when he was transformed, at least not to most people, but Mel had been around him long enough to just know. "Up for a swim?"

Repeat shifted back to his own shape and climbed up Mel's leg until he could grab onto her backpack. "You see all the Tentacool in the water, right?"

"So that's a no?"

"Right. I don't really want to get poisoned today."

A silvery voice, light and pleasant, interrupted them. "Do the two of you require assistance?" It belonged to a small figure, one who'd approached them from behind without either of them noticing. They wore a trench coat that had to have been at least two sizes too big for them, and with the collar pulled up and their newsboy cap pulled down, all Mel could see of their face was an oversized pair of glasses.

"Do you sneak up on everyone like that, kid?" Mel asked, willing her heart to slow down after the surprise. "Or are we just the lucky ones?"

"With respect, Miss Rylan, I am not a kid." They rummaged in one of their many pockets and held up a leather wallet, which flipped open to reveal a piece of rectangular plastic: a license. Across the top, it read "Private Investigator," and underneath it, "Hyacinth Harley." It bore a picture of them too, but somehow they'd convinced the photographer to let them keep their hat and coat on for it, rendering it useless.

Mel frowned and took a sharp step away from Hyacinth. "How'd you know my name?"

"If I had to guess," Repeat muttered, "it's probably because they're a PI." Mel shushed him and kept her eyes on Hyacinth.

Hyacinth folded the wallet back up and slid it into a different pocket than it had originally come out of. "Do forgive my impropriety," they said, bowing their head. "My current case involves you, albeit indirectly, so when I happened upon you here, I regarded it as a stroke of luck."

"Your… current case?" Mel asked, arching an eyebrow. There was nothing coming off of Hyacinth except for cheerfulness and a desire to be helpful, which only served to make Mel more suspicious.

"Yes. My client has requested that I obtain information on a certain pair of organizations. Your name, Miss Rylan, came up in connection to the disappearance of a gym leader that is suspected to be the work of one of them."

Mel winced. "Janine…"

"Correct. I gather from your appearance here that you are also looking into that organization, since they have a presence here, as I predicted." Hyacinth's glasses gleamed in what Mel hoped was equivalent to a smile. "So then, that leads us back to my original inquiry. Do you require assistance across the water? If you intend to sabotage their operations, that would not interfere with my plans, and would in fact likely help, since you would draw their attention away from me."

"One second." Mel wandered out of earshot, made sure her back was to Hyacinth, and held Repeat in her arms. "What do you make of them?" she whispered.

"I'm not sure, chief," answered Repeat. "I can't get a read on them. But honestly, if they want to help us cross the water, I'm not sure we should pass it up. It'd make our life easier, at least."

"Sounds good to me." Mel let Repeat scramble back to her backpack and approached Hyacinth. "Yeah, if you're offering help," she said, "we won't say no. What's the catch?"

"There's no catch!" said Hyacinth, holding up two gloved hands. "I mean, I may wish to ask a favor of you some time later, but that's nothing more than a little quid pro quo, and certainly not anything like a catch." A green Pokeball, one with red spots, appeared in their palm – Mel recognized it as one of the artisan Pokeballs that were all the rage in Johto – and they tossed it to the very edge of the beach, where the water lapped at the sand. The Pokemon that came out was bulky and taller than Mel, and for a moment she had a brief panic that it was another Hariyama. As this one faded into sight, though, she realized what it really was. Pointed ears sat atop a round head, which was itself atop an even rounder body; heavy footfalls shook the ground with every step – it couldn't have been anything except a Snorlax.

"A Snorlax is going to get us across the water?" Mel asked, incredulity seeping in at the edge of her voice.

"Yes, quite! Even though she doesn't look it, my dear Dozer is a talented swimmer. She'll have us over there in a flash!" Hyacinth, unable to reach high enough to pat the Snorlax's head, settled for patting her arm instead. "Ready, Dozer?"

Dozer grunted an assent and slid herself into the water, floating effortlessly. Mel reached out to Dozer's emotions, but immediately pulled away before she fell asleep herself; Dozer, true to her name, was tired above everything else. "Please, come aboard," Hyacinth said, wading into the water and hauling themself onto Dozer's back.

Mel glanced over her shoulder at Repeat, who gave the Ditto equivalent of a shrug, then followed Hyacinth.

The ride was surprisingly smooth, especially for how quickly Dozer was kicking her feet. Dozer's back had enough room for both Mel and Hyacinth to hold on, and the distance between them and the island rapidly dwindled. "So what can you tell me about these Neo Rocket guys?" Mel asked over the sound of splashing water.

"I haven't uncovered much yet," said Hyacinth. They closed their eyes thoughtfully. "From the information I have gathered, though, it seems that the organization has roots in the Sinnoh region, though they only adopted the moniker of Neo Rocket when they relocated to Kanto."

"So they don't have any ties to the original Rockets?"

"I don't believe so. I suspect they chose the name specifically because of its connotations among Kantonians – their organization as of present is not very large, so perhaps they wished to choose a name that made them seem bigger. But this is all speculation on my part."

 _That figures_ , Mel thought. _Just a bunch of punks trying to look tougher than they really are._ "Found out anything about what they're gunning for?"

Hyacinth shook their head, looking off into the distance towards the island they were approaching. "Nothing concrete as of yet, I'm afraid. Their existence alone is nothing more than rumor in most circles. They appear at seemingly-random locations, then disappear just as quickly. The only direct action I've heard of them taking is the abduction of the Fuchsia gym leader. Of course, since they are such a small organization, any action they do take is likely to evade the notice of most."

 _So they haven't done a whole lot. They're looking for the Mew-child, though; I know that much. Kidnapping Janine must have something to do with it somehow. Did Janine know more than she let on?_ The ocean spray misted Mel as Dozer plowed through an especially strong wave, scattering droplets across her glasses that dried almost instantly, leaving near-opaque splotches that broke up her field of vision. The rain had cleared up, but Mel was no less wet. She reached a hand behind her and Repeat tapped it with a pseudopod, letting her know that he hadn't fallen off.

Dozer slowed to a stop as they approached the shore, and Mel and Hyacinth climbed off of her back. "Good job," Hyacinth cooed, patting Dozer's arm; Dozer grunted something in response before Hyacinth recalled her into the Pokeball. "You know, I'm rather envious of you, Miss Rylan," they continued as they and Mel approached the ruins.

"Why's that?"

"Well, you have such a great connection with your Ditto. Repeat was the name, correct? I love Dozer, but I don't often know what she's telling me." Hyacinth craned their head up at the collapsed building that towered before them. Golden-hued bricks, each individually the size of Mel's head, were crafted with care into an entryway that led into the stone of the island itself. Two massive pillars framed the entrance, but Mel could only just barely see past them; no light came from inside the ruins themselves. "It must be so much more convenient to be psychic."

Mel had been taking a sip of water from a bottle she kept in her bag. That water promptly got spat across the sand. "Wha—How did you—I mean—"

Hyacinth shot an inquisitive glance back towards Mel; at least, Mel assumed it was supposed to be inquisitive. "Was that a secret? I'm terribly sorry. It was simple to put the pieces together. It is one thing, of course, to have such strong rapport with your own Pokemon that you understand them, but during my investigation I located an article that the Fuchsia Gazette published concerning your family's shelter, and it indicated that your role was to locate Pokemon who had been abused. The journalist specifically mentioned that you had a, quote, remarkable sense of intuition with regards to other Pokemon. As that seems to be consistent with what has been reported with regards to other psychic trainers, it was only a minor logical leap to assume that you too possess psychic abilities."

 _Okay, I definitely don't trust them._ "Dunno what you're talking about," Mel said, shoving her water bottle back in her bag a bit more roughly than was perhaps necessary and grabbing a flashlight instead. "Let's get this show on the road, okay?"

The Neo Rockets had already disappeared, doubtlessly, Mel figured, into the ruins themselves. She climbed the crumbling stairway towards the entrance, taking care to avoid the steps that had already collapsed. The interior of the structure had weathered the ages better than the exterior; the brickwork, though hardly pristine, still held up. A maze of walls greeted her, all decorated with raised bumps in arcane patterns. The air was musty and still, and when Mel reached out into her surroundings with her mind, she not only felt the presence of a small group of other people, but also something disquieting, something alien. She put her finger to her lips and Hyacinth nodded, neither of them making a sound, then Mel gestured towards where she could feel the other minds coming from most strongly.

As they crept around the walls, the sound of conversation became more evident further ahead. Mel switched off her flashlight; enough light came from the people they were approaching for her to see. She motioned for Hyacinth to follow her.

There were four of them ahead, two with their backs to them and another two past that facing them. The two closest to Mel were an elderly man and a young woman, both in hiking clothes, though the woman wore them a bit more comfortably, and both wielding lanterns. The man, hunched over, held himself up with a cane. "I don't intend to tell you lot anything," he said in a wheezing rattle, while the woman made a series of gestures – sign language, Mel realized.

The other two, the ones facing Mel and Hyacinth, hadn't noticed them yet – their attention was focused on the old man. They were Neo Rockets; Mel could tell that much from the uniforms. They were not, though, the ones Mel had seen at the Venomoth Festival. Their shapeless clothes made it hard to tell anything about who they were, but neither of them were as big as No.7 or as small as No.3. These two were much closer in size to each other, though the one that was brandishing a monochromatic Pokeball was a touch shorter and maybe a little more slight. Just like the other Neo Rockets, though, when Mel tried to reach out to their minds, she got only emptiness in return. "What you intend does not matter," said the one with the Pokeball in a numbing drone. "You will be useful to our endeavors regardless."

Mel's eyes widened.

She knew that voice.

"Janine?!"


	6. Creature of Past and Future

Mel slapped a hand over her own mouth, the outburst unintentional, but it was too late. Every eye in the hallway was on her – Repeat, the two Rockets, the old man, the young woman, Hyacinth, plus an assortment of other minds Mel could feel in a vague way surrounding her. _There goes the element of surprise_ , she thought, switching her flashlight back on.

"It appears our cover is blown," said Hyacinth, wholly unnecessarily. "Am I correct in assuming that you believe that one of the two Neo Rocket members before us is the missing Fuchsia gym leader? If so, then it would not be unfair to deduce that the Neo Rockets are engaging in some form of brainwashing."

The Neo Rocket shook her head. "There is no Janine. I am Neo Rocket No.8." Even as she said it, Mel could see her mulberry-colored hair curling out from under her cap, and her eyes, though dull and lifeless, were nevertheless still the purple Mel remembered. "Too many people are here. The odds are turning against us," No.8 added, angling her head towards her partner. "Orders, No.2?"

"Simple enough," said No.2. Her voice sounded familiar, and Mel struggled to remember why until No.2 slid up her sleeve and muttered "Prepare the ship" into her transceiver – she'd last heard her voice through a transceiver the night of the Venomoth Festival. "We execute Plan 18-Sigma. Disorient and disappear." Though No.2, just like all of the other Neo Rockets, wore a bandanna over her mouth, Mel could have sworn she was smiling – and just then, Mel felt in No.2's head a pressure, like something hidden away imperfectly struggling to break through.

"Understood." No.8 threw her Pokeball to the ground. A Venomoth appeared, one that Mel had seen countless times before, one that she knew when it was still a Venonat. Its eyes and mind were just as blank as its trainer's.

"I think you'll find," the elderly man croaked, "that we will be more than equal to your challenge. Isabella?"

His partner nodded and signed something furiously, her hands flying around each other too quickly for Mel to follow in the low light. She, too, opened a Pokeball; this one had inside it a creature that looked alarmingly like a pipe organ given life. Easily as tall as Hyacinth, the Pokemon opened its massive maw and let out a roar that Mel felt reverberating through her bones long after it finished.

 _Don't see many Exploud around these parts,_ Mel thought. Out loud, she said, "Wait! Hold on! Janine, you remember me at least, right?" Isabella fired a clenched-teeth scowl at her, but Mel held out a hand for her to wait a moment. "You promised to help me out if I needed it! Remember? At the festival?"

No.8 squinted at Mel, then glanced back at No.2, who shrugged. "No," she said.

Mel took a step closer. "But—"

That was as far as she got before the Venomoth let out a buzz, one that increased in pitch so quickly that Mel didn't even have time to register it. It was Bug Buzz, definitely, but it was much stronger than what Mel had come to expect from Janine's battles; it filled Mel's ears with infinite nails on infinite chalkboards, tormented shrieking banshees, screaming alarm bells. Pain flooded her mind – both from the emotions of everyone around her and because her own senses were shutting down. Through a haze that threatened to swallow her mind entirely, Mel saw an explosion of smoke ahead of them, where the Neo Rockets had been, and Isabella and her Exploud charging through it. Mel tried to follow, but her legs were filled with lead; she stumbled to the ground as the Bug Buzz faded away, leaving only a piercing ringing in her ears.

"Womwanna annawa wah?" Repeat asked.

"Come again?" Even just asking a question jabbed needles into Mel's head. She lay prone on the stone tiles that formed the floor. They were cold against her cheek, but a faint humming ran through them that kept them from being as soothing as they could have been. She lifted her head, but vertigo struck and the walls around her threw themselves into a spin cycle. She gently lowered herself back down. _Not so bad when I don't move…_

"Wom Janine annawa strong?" said Repeat again.

Mel reached out with a shaking hand. Repeat was within arm's reach and patted her gently; he, too, was on the ground, but that was less surprising for him. "I don't know if Janine was always that strong," she said. She could only barely understand her own words; answering Repeat's question required some guesswork. "I know gym leaders got that thing where they use different Pokemon depending on how many badges the trainer has. Maybe Janine was also really good at getting her Pokemon to pull their punches on weaker guys."

A pair of worn loafers, nearly obscured by a trench coat, stepped into Mel's field of vision. "Are you all right, Miss Rylan?" asked Hyacinth. Mel could almost hear them perfectly, now – the ringing was disappearing. "That Venomoth's attack was difficult to endure, but you seemed to take it harder than the rest of us. I suppose that must be a result of your, ah…" They shot a barely-perceptible glance towards the last remaining person in the hall – the old man. "Your ability, hm?" They lowered their voice and extended their hand, offering Mel help up. "Were you feeling the pain that the rest of us felt as well?"

"I don't much want to talk about it." Mel slowly rose to her feet without Hyacinth's help, a complex process that involved nearly falling over at least three times. Once upright, she wavered a little, her balance not immediately returning to her. "So, uh, what happened?"

"Young lady," the old man said, "What happened is that you and your friend scared off those criminals. You have my thanks." He looked small, but Mel realized that was mostly due to him being bent over almost double, leaning on an ornate polished oak cane for support. He wore a sturdy jacket and pants that hung loosely on his wiry frame, and a mane of powder-white hair exploded from his head like dandelion fluff. He squinted at Mel through glasses that magnified his already-wide eyes to almost cartoonish levels. "Though I've got faith in dear Isabella's abilities, she would have been outnumbered."

"Uh, sure." _If he wants to see it that way, I'm not going to stop him._ "Hey, you wouldn't happen to be Silktree, would you?"

"Why, yes. Professor Silktree, at your service." Silktree attempted to bow, but couldn't bend much further than he already had. "To what do I owe the pleasure?"

Mel clapped her hands together, then immediately winced; even that noise was enough to put her head on edge. "We were looking for you," she said, gesturing to Repeat as he wound his way back up to her shoulder. He tapped the back of her neck knowingly. "Oh, right. Sorry. My name's Mel, and he's Repeat. Them over there, the one in the trench coat who's looking at the walls and pretending like they're not listening, that's Hyacinth. Nice to meet you. Look, Repeat and I need your help." She knew better than to spill her life story to a stranger, but her mouth was running on automatic; her brain was no more able to stop the words spilling out than a sponge could stop a Blastoise's Hydro Pump. "Janine, the gym leader, told us we needed to track you down, but then those Neo Rocket Guys got their grimy little hands on her, and now she's completely brainwashed or something. And there's this other group, a cult, calling themselves Genesis, and they're on my tail too."

Hyacinth had produced a pad of paper from one of their endless pockets and was diligently taking notes.

"Ugh, and Janine was right there, too!" Mel continued, clenching her fists. She wasn't really talking to Silktree anymore. The floodgates had fully opened, and they were going to stay open until she ran dry. "She was right in front of me! I'm such an idiot! I could have saved her! I could have saved her and brought her back and… and…!"

"Chief," Repeat said quietly. Hyacinth kept writing away, even though Mel was certain all they could understand was Repeat saying various permutations of "Ditto, Ditto." "It's all right. It'll be okay."

"Come on, Repeat! How can you say that?! How do you know how this'll go? What if that was our only chance to rescue Janine? What if she stays brainwashed forever because… because I…"

A fist slammed into a wall nearby, leaving an impressively-sized dent. Mel knew, logically, that it was probably because the ruins were old enough that the bricks had weakened, but it still shocked her into silence. The fist belonged to Isabella, and now Mel was able to get a better look at her. Isabella stood just as tall as Mel and had a runner's build, all lean muscle. Unlike the professor, her hiking outfit fit her perfectly; she was deeply tanned and her hair, reddish brown, was cut above her chin. In short, she looked to Mel like she spent most of her time outside. Her lantern was hooked to her backpack, and together with Silktree's lantern, they made Mel's flashlight almost redundant.

Isabella withdrew her fist, showing no sign of discomfort, and signed something furiously at Mel, leaning forward and gritting her teeth. Mel put her hands up. "Hold on, hold on," she said, "it's been a while since I last read sign, Isabella—"

"I. Z. Z. Y." The hand motions were slow and insultingly deliberate, and Mel realized that she'd never actually been spoken down to in sign language before. She wasn't a fan, she decided. "My name is Izzy," Izzy continued, her signs slower. "Only the professor calls me Isabella. I'm his assistant, after all. But you? No. All of this that's happened is your fault."

"…Is… my… fault…" whispered Mel, trying to keep up. She couldn't say anything in return; as soon as she'd finished parsing Izzy's words, translating them from the raw signs to sentences in her head, Izzy kept going.

"A single Venomoth?" Izzy asked, putting extra flair into the sign for Venomoth, a chimera of the signs for 'moth' and 'poison'. "Easy to handle. But you were a distraction. You stopped me. You scared them off. They set off a smoke bomb, and by the time I got through the smoke to get out of the ruins, they were already in their submarine. Off they went. I could have captured them. Kept them from doing anything else. But no."

"Now, now." Silktree's voice, soft-spoken and uneven though it was, cut through Izzy's tirade more thoroughly than Mel could have ever hoped to. He turned to Izzy, and from the way she focused on his mouth, her eyes almost burning a hole in his face, Mel realized she was reading his lips. "Isabella, nothing will be gained from browbeating her this way. Regardless of what you think, the facts are that those criminals are gone now, and we are all relatively unharmed." He stuck a finger in his ear and rubbed one of the inner ridges. "Even if it may take some time for our hearing to fully recover. Now… Mel, was it? You've told me that you had quite a road getting to me, but what did you need to find me for? I'm not exactly the life of the party these days," he added with a dry chuckle.

Mel took a deep breath, trying to ignore Izzy's penetrating glare. "We're trying to find the Mew-child."

Hyacinth's pen dropped from their hand, while Izzy snorted and rolled her eyes. Silktree, though, simply watched Mel, his eyes, magnified through his glasses, suddenly analytical and calculating. "It's funny you say that," he said. "In fact—"

Their lanterns went out.

Mel fumbled with her flashlight, but it too had been extinguished.

The darkness that surrounded them, impermeable, had weight to it, a soft yet unyielding pressure bearing down on them that felt like an anvil wrapped in a blanket.

The ruins watched them.

The bumps that were scattered across the walls lit up, each one a single eye.

Humming – or was it chanting? – echoed through the hall, quiet yet impossible to ignore. The eyes began moving, crawling across the walls and through the air around them. Mel could almost see shapes attached to them, rough outlines that looked like arcane symbols at first but gradually resolved into letters. The alien presence that had been lurking underneath all of the other minds in the ruins rose to the forefront, impossible to read.

"Unown," Mel whispered.

"That's right," Silktree whispered back. "The Unown in the Ruins of Alph recently became agitated. I came out here to see if it was happening here too. They began spelling words out to anyone in the ruins, like—"

 _MEW CHILD_. The words hovered in the air, just barely visible in the darkness. The Unown shuffled themselves around, forming a different word next: _FIND_. Then _PROTECT._

 _The Unown… that's what the psychic call I got said. Find and protect the Mew-child_ , Mel thought. _Are these guys the ones who called me?_ "Where is the Mew-child? What do I need to do?" she asked, her voice clarion even over the clamoring of the Unown.

The next sentence had more words in it, and it took the Unown longer to wrangle enough of themselves in order. _CREATURE OF PAST AND FUTURE_.

"The Mew-child is? What does that mean?"

 _GATHER THAT WHICH HOLDS WITHIN ITSELF LIFE OF THE PAST._ Mel could hear the sound of Hyacinth's pen scratching dutifully against their paper. _GATHER THAT WHICH PUSHES ARTIFICIAL LIFE INTO THE FUTURE,_ the Unown continued. _BRING THEM TO THE ISLE WHERE LIFE BEGINS. THERE THE MEW CHILD WILL BE FOUND._

The words disappeared, replaced only by a few punctuation-shaped Unown frantically rushing by. Then, like a movie ending, the light from the lanterns gradually faded back in, with no sign that anything unusual had happened.

"That seems to be that," wavered Silktree, a vaguely pleased look on his weathered features. "That's the most I've ever seen any Unown say. The ones in Johto only repeated 'Mew-child' and 'Tanoby' over and over again. It sounds to me like they had an answer for your question, though, Mel. If you're looking for the Mew-child, then I'd wager that following the steps the Unown laid out for you might be a good start. They're uncanny sometimes, these Pokemon."

Izzy's response was less measured. "I think you owe us an explanation," she signed, ice behind her narrowed eyes. "What is going on here?"

Mel looked to Repeat, who shrugged, and Hyacinth, who was too busy writing in their notes to notice. She sucked in air through her teeth, her mind racing to figure out all the angles. "Well," she eventually said, "it's like this…"

"So you're telling me," Izzy said, her hand motions sharp, "that not one, but two different groups are angling for this… make-believe fairy tale?"

Silktree held up a hand. "I scarcely think we can call the Mew-child a fairy tale, especially not after the display here today. It sounds to me like time is of the essence, Mel. I won't keep you any longer. Isabella? Shall we be off?"

"Wait." Izzy approached Mel, her footfalls heavy, and leaned in towards her. "From everything you've told us, if the Mew-child is real, then…"

Mel arched her eyebrows. "Then…?"

"Then if it's depending on you? It won't be alive for much longer." Izzy scowled, made a hand motion that Mel didn't recognize but suspected the worst about, and rejoined the professor, helping him slowly out of the ruins.

"Tch!" Mel sniffed. "She's something else, isn't she?"

"She's definitely some variety of pill, boss," Repeat said. "But more to the point, it really does sound like we shouldn't dawdle too long. What do you make of what the Unown said?"

"Not sure. Hey, Hyacinth!" called Mel. "Got a minute?"

Hyacinth pocketed their pencil and began flipping through the notepad. "For you, Miss Rylan? Certainly. With what do you require my assistance?"

"You were writing up a storm while all of… _that_ was going on," Mel said, waving her arms in the air in a vain attempt to indicate the vastness of what had happened. "I know you've got some ideas about those things I'm supposed to gather. The things about past life and future life."

"As it happens," said Hyacinth, finding a specific page and tearing it out, "I do indeed. Here, I'll leave you with this."

Mel took the page before the words sunk in. "Huh? You're on your way out too?"

"Unfortunately so, as much as I would love to help you out more directly. My first priority is to my client, and I believe I've gathered quite a lot of information on Genesis and the Neo Rockets that my client will be interested in hearing. So I will bid you farewell for now, Miss Rylan. I do hope we encounter each other again." Hyacinth bowed and followed Isabella's path out.

Mel waved. "Looks like it's just the two of us again," she said once Hyacinth was gone.

"Just like old times, boss," said Repeat. "Or at least times earlier than today. What's in the note Hyacinth left?"

"Let's see." Mel unfolded the paper.

In tight, immaculate handwriting, Hyacinth had transcribed the entire message left by the Unown, and at the bottom, they'd added in some notes of their own: "Holds within life of the past = Pewter Museum? Could describe a fossil of some kind. Maybe a starting point. Pushes artificial life into the future = go to Silph Co. Could reference their work."

"That sounds as good a place to start as any," Repeat said.

"Then let's hit the road."


	7. Relics of Ancient Times

When Mel was in her teens, she'd come down with Togepox. Were it not for her age, this would have been a completely ordinary occurrence, but Togepox hit harder the older the victim was; she ended up spending several days bedbound and slathered in calamine lotion. Being cooped up tended to make Mel antsy anyway – at least unless she'd voluntarily chosen to sequester herself – but not even being able to get out of bed was nearly enough to drive her mad.

The worst part was that the only book she had within easy reach was _A Relentlessly Thorough History of the Pewter Museum of Science_. After a week of being in bed, unable to sleep full nights because of the itching, Mel had memorized the whole thing front to back.

Coincidentally, 'front to back' was how Mel was reciting the contents of _A Relentlessly Thorough History of the Pewter Museum of Science_ to Repeat as they sat side by side on the deck of the Seagallop, cutting a swift path through the ocean back towards Vermilion City. The sun hid itself behind a layer of angry clouds, but it hadn't yet started raining; the breeze that caressed their faces was brisk and bore a pleasant sting of salt water.

"After Mr. Rockwell donated the sizeable endowment to the Stone family (no relation, of course, to the famous Stones of the Devon Corporation), they had enough capital to begin construction on the museum."

"Boss."

"The museum's prize Kabutops fossil was actually found during construction – when they broke ground for the first time, they came across said fossil in remarkably good condition. Though the contents of the museum's fossil collection enter and exit the public-facing exhibits on a rotating schedule, the Kabutops fossil always stays on display (excepting the period where it was loaned to the Nacrene Museum in Unova; it was returned quickly after an undisclosed event the gym leader of Nacrene described as 'haunting' and 'inexplicable')."

" _Boss_."

"Following the museum's fire, officially stated to be caused by wild Magmar but rumored to be related to the then-ascendant Team Rocket, the Stones elected to renovate the entire facility rather than simply rebuild. This was, of course, the first of many renovations that the museum underwent. Curiously, the museum's Omanyte fossil disappeared in the fire, roughly around the same time that a live Omanyte appeared in the Fuchsia City Zoo. Mr. Baoba, proprietor of the Safari Zone and the Fuchsia City Zoo, claimed the two events were 'wildly coincidental'."

" _Boss!_ Please, for the love of my sanity, stop talking for a minute!" Repeat rubbed his pseudopods up and down the side of what would have been called his head if he had been wearing the guise of anything else. "I can't even start describing how little I care about the history of the museum. I just asked if you knew anything about this place, and clearly that wasn't a good call."

Mel rubbed Repeat's back. It was an old-wives'-tale remedy for seasickness, she knew that much, but she figured it couldn't hurt either way. "Did I give you a headache? My bad," she said.

"Yeah, a little bit of one," Repeat said, taking slow breaths, "but it's going away. No worries." A Wingull, rare this far out from their natural habitat, squawked somewhere behind them; Repeat smiled, then, too late, realized his mistake. "But don't start—"

"It's estimated that over the course of its esteemed history, the Pewter Museum has had on display more varieties of fossils than any other museum in the world, but to assume that they only dealt in ancient Pokemon would be to do a massive disservice to their aeronautics and space exhibits…"

For as much as Kanto had grown over the years, one problem that the region had never quite figured out was transportation. Sure, the magnet train ran from Saffron to Goldenrod in Johto; sure, the S. S. Aqua ran from Vermilion to Olivine. There were even underground paths that connected Lavender to Celadon and Vermilion to Cerulean. But if, hypothetically, someone were so inclined to travel from the port at Vermilion to the museum in Pewter, the quickest available options were to take Diglett's Cave or cut back through Mount Moon.

Some days, Mel thought as she reapplied a protective layer of Max Repel ("Silph Co.'s hottest hit! Keeps the pests at bay! Now for Longer!"), it felt like everyone assumed she had a Pokemon that knew Fly. As she trudged through the cavern, she saw with some amount of satisfaction that the Diglett were avoiding her; every so often, though, what she thought was a group of Diglett huddled together turned out to be a single Dugtrio, and it invariably gave chase. Dugtrio were speedy critters, and she only barely managed to outrun them each time – except the last one.

"Ready to go, Repeat?" Mel asked, driven into a corner by an especially belligerent Dugtrio.

"You got it, boss," said Repeat, climbing down to the end of her outstretched arm.

"Then let's give this Dugtrio a taste of what it's angling for." Mel tossed Repeat into the air; by the time he landed, he was a near-perfect copy of the Dugtrio, albeit one that wore the same face on each head. "Repeat! Give it a Sand Attack!"

Repeat burrowed underground and kicked up behind him a thick cloud of sand and dirt, heavy enough that it obscured the two of them from view. The Dugtrio closed its eyes, trying to keep sand out of them, but when it opened them again, its foes had vanished.

"The fine print is how they get ya," Mel muttered. Their mad dash left them at the western end of the tunnel, and Mel braced herself against the mouth of the cavern, holding up an empty bottle of Max Repel. Across the bottom, in font so small she had to lift her glasses up, get right up close, and still squint on top of that, was the text 'Product may not perform as expected against comparatively powerful Pokemon.' She knew that was how the whole Repel line of items worked – she was no novice when it came to avoiding battle, and it wasn't like Repeat was an especially strong Pokemon, as much as she loved him – but hope still sprung eternal.

Pewter City was never especially lively, a trait it shared with most of the towns on Kanto's western edge. It was built into the side of a mountain, and was bordered on its southern and eastern exits by a forest filled with poisonous bugs and a cavern filled with less-poisonous but more-obnoxious bats respectively; those traits combined meant that the town was quiet on the best of days. Even the construction of a fully-fledged Pokemon hospital to supplement the Pokemon Center, a project spearheaded by the Pewter gym leader, hadn't brought many people to the area. Mel suspected Brock liked it that way; to hear Janine tell it, Brock was a gym leader with several projects on the side, including fossil hunting, exploring Mount Moon, and Pokemon breeding. It was a miracle that he spent any time at all at the gym, Mel thought. He'd become a gym leader when he was young, quite some time before Janine, and the years since had, admittedly, been good to him.

Brock paced around the entrance of the museum as Mel approached, a stack of fliers in his hands. "Interested in rocks? Who wouldn't be, right?" he said, holding a paper out to her. "Right now, the Pewter Museum of Science is running a special on… on…" He paused, his chiseled features creasing as he looked her over. "I don't know you, do I? Did you ever have a match against me?"

"If I did," Mel said, plucking her glasses from her face and cleaning them on her shirt, "I don't remember it. I'm Mel Rylan. This is Repeat."

Repeat waved.

"Rylan… Rylan… Ah-ha!" Brock snapped his fingers, then scrambled to keep the fliers from spilling after the sudden motion. "You're from that Pokemon shelter down in Fuchsia! That's why I know your face. Janine showed me that commercial you filmed, with the ninja costumes. What a trip."

"Oh. Er." Mel felt her cheeks heat up. Being recognized by a gym leader came with the territory, but she had hoped it would have been for a more reputable reason. "Thanks, I guess."

"You know, Janine wouldn't shut up about you," Brock continued. "Mel this, Mel that."

Mel's face burned even hotter.

"But, uh, I suppose that's a conversation to save for happier times. Hopefully the police find her soon. Er, what brings you around these parts?" asked Brock, suddenly not meeting her eyes. Sadness and melancholy oozed off of him; Mel remembered that Janine had told her that Brock had been one of the kindest gym leaders to her when she had just been starting out.

The following series of thoughts ran through Mel's head in response to his question:

 _I'm looking for a fossil or something else that 'has life within it'._

 _I'm probably going to have to take it with me._

 _I can't tell him that I'm trying to take a fossil. They don't just let you take fossils._

 _Right?_

 _Right, of course not. What kind of museum lets you take the fossils? Dumb to even think that, really._

 _But imagine if they did. You could just walk out of the place with a whole Kabutops skeleton in tow. How awesome would that be?_

 _What would I even do with a Kabutops skeleton?_

 _What_ wouldn't _I do with a Kabutops skeleton?_

 _Maybe Repeat could eat it. Then he'd be, I dunno, some kind of Ditto-Kabutops. A… Dittobutops. A Dittops?_

 _Okay, okay, getting sidetracked. I should have answered by now. He's giving me a weird look. Or maybe that's just how he normally looks. Either way. Um. Think of something. Think of something!_

"I was, um. I heard about the, about the…" Words spilled from Mel's mouth as quickly as they were crossing her mind. "The special! The special on, er…" She could just see the fliers in Brock's arms; they were upside-down and his arms covered most of the text on them, leaving only the letters 'AERO' visible. "The… Aerodactyl… fossil?" Mel said, praying that she'd guessed correctly.

Brock shifted the fliers from one hand to the other, revealing more of the text: 'AERONAUTICS EXHIBIT'. Mel's heart dropped through her stomach. "I'm really surprised, Mel," he said. His expression was inscrutable, and even his emotions weren't giving her anything useful – he still gave off sad vibes over what happened to Janine. "I can't believe…"

 _Here it comes…_

"That someone's actually here to see the Aerodactyl fossil!" Brock pressed one of the fliers into Mel's hands. The top half read 'AERONAUTICS EXHIBIT', while the bottom half read 'AERODACTYL FOSSIL'. Fine print underneath it all indicated that there was a discounted entrance fee on both new exhibits. "Everyone's been coming to see the exhibit on the space shuttle! You know, it's a perfect scaled-down replica. You can even get inside and see all the different control panels. But nobody's cared about the fossils, which just breaks my heart!"

"Uh, yeah," Mel said, trying not to let on how quickly her heart was beating. "About that. Why are you out here shilling for the museum, anyway?"

Brock waved a hand. "Oh, you know how it is. I owed the director a favor, I tried to take her out to lunch to repay it, she told me that she would sooner swim through the Seafoam Islands in the buff than go out to lunch with me, I asked her if dinner was okay instead, she shoved a bunch of fliers at me and told me to hand them out. And so here I am. I've almost made it through a third of the stack!"

"Uh huh." Mel eyed the fliers. She was no expert, but she suspected that there were enough there to give one to every resident of Pewter twice over and then some. "Anyway. Aerodactyl fossil. Definitely what I'm here for. Can you point me in the right direction?"

"Oh yeah! It's on the first floor, in the western wing. You can't miss it once you're in there. And hey! Tell the woman at the front desk I sent you, and she might let you in free." Brock thought for a moment. "Or she might charge you more. Take care, okay?"

The fossil in question was in fact nearly impossible to miss – it hung, fully assembled, from the ceiling of the Ancient Rarities exhibit in a pose that suggested it was likely to take a bite out of the next person unwise enough to walk underneath it. "'This prehistoric Pokemon used its claws to grab prey and its massive jaw to tear them to pieces,'" Mel read from a plaque nearby. "Wouldn't want to run into one, huh, Repeat?"

"No kidding, boss. I'm pretty sure that if it had its sights set on you, you couldn't do much about it. Look how big it is."

"Yeah, pictures don't really do it justice." Mel walked along the edges of the room, where smaller fossils were on display in glass cases. "Now, see, look at this one."

Repeat, perched on Mel's head, craned forward to see. "This chunk of amber?"

"Yeah. Says it's got Aerodactyl's DNA in it. Wild, right? Something so small's got instructions in it to build something so big."

"That is how DNA works, boss."

"Shut up, Repeat. You know what I meant. I'm just, it's like, it's…" Mel flailed for the right word. "It's cool, is all," she finished lamely.

Repeat patted the back of Mel's head. "Relax, chief. I understand. What's that rock in the next display? It doesn't look like a fossil."

"This one?" A few paces away, there was another stand. This one had no glass surrounding it; the gemstone it displayed rested on a cushion and was exposed to the open air. It was a perfect sphere colored a glimmering lavender, and it could have easily fit in Mel's palm. A streak of darker purple and gray ran through the center like a lightning bolt. "I dunno. Never seen anything like it before."

"'This gemstone was excavated from the same site as the Aerodactyl fossil. It bears some strong similarity to the enigmatic Mega Stones; the current leading hypothesis is that it would allow an Aerodactyl to undergo Mega Evolution, though it has not yet been able to be tested. As such, we have given it the temporary name of Aerodactylite to match the naming conventions of other Mega Stones,'" Repeat read aloud. "A Mega Stone, huh? I wonder how it ties into the fossil… What do you think, boss?"

When Mel didn't respond, Repeat slithered down to her shoulder and looked her in the face. Her eyes were wide and glassy, and he could see in them the reflected image of the Mega Stone. "Boss? Hey, you okay?" asked Repeat. "What's up?"

Mel slowly lifted her arm, reaching her hand towards the rock.

"Whoa, whoa, boss, what's going on?" Repeat clapped his pseudopods together in front of Mel's eyes, which didn't make as loud a noise as he had hoped.

Mel gently touched the rock with her index finger, and—

"Excuse me, miss!" The curator for the exhibit, a small round woman with years of working around the general public etched into her face, grabbed Mel's arm and unceremoniously moved it and her out of rock-touching range. Just as Mel's contact broke, Repeat saw a small spark of electricity flicker between her finger and the Mega Stone; at the same moment, the life came back to her eyes. "No touching the exhibits, miss!" the curator continued. "Unless it's one of the Touch Your History exhibits, which are clearly labeled!"

"Uh, uh… Sorry," Mel said, placing a hand to the side of her head and blinking a few times. A fog had settled around her mind and it was only starting to clear. "Dunno what came over me."

That seemed to satisfy the curator, who went about her business, which in this case was telling a small child they couldn't lick the Aerodactyl bones no matter how hard they tried. The rest of the exhibit was empty, leaving the two of them alone.

Mel shook her head, trying to clear the mental haze faster. "What happened?" she muttered.

"That's what I want to know, chief. Are you okay?"

"Yeah… yeah," said Mel. "I think so. Hey, Repeat, what do you think…" She trailed off as she dug around in her bag for Hyacinth's notes.

"What do I think? That's kind of a big question, wouldn't you say?" Repeat said, resuming his place on Mel's head.

"Holds within it life of the past," Mel read under her breath. "Holds _within it_ life of the past… Repeat, I think I just realized something. I don't think the fossils are what we're supposed to be looking for."

Repeat frowned, squinting at Hyacinth's perfect handwriting. "They're not?"

"The fossils, right, they don't have anything _within_ them. Like, normal bone stuff, I guess, but there's nothing special about the inside of a fossil, I don't think. But there is something here that has life inside it." Mel paced back to the display they'd been standing at earlier. "The amber. That has life _inside_ it. I bet that's what we're supposed to walk outta here with."

"Walk out of—what're you suggesting, boss?" asked Repeat.

"Easy enough. They're not about to just give us the amber if we walk up and ask for it, right? So…" Mel shoved Hyacinth's paper back into her bag, then snuck glances around her to make sure nobody was listening. "Repeat, we've got a heist to plan."


	8. Interlude: Remnants of the Old Road

In a different time, in a different place, there was a child.

This was not, on the surface, unusual. After all, at most points in history, there tended to be a non-zero number of children.

The child mostly kept to herself. She was shy, and even when she did speak, her voice was timorous and quiet, so much so that the people around her rarely even heard her.

This, too, was not unusual. Shy children were never unheard of, even if they were unheard from.

The child was small for her age and she had thick raven-black hair. She preferred the darkness to the light – the light always hurt her eyes, especially with the thick glasses she had to wear. She loved to sneak out of her home after the sun had set and explore the town when nobody else was around – when streetlights cast a pallid glow across the roads, barely holding back the darkness of the sky. The other children gave her the nickname 'Moon' as a result.

None of this was unusual, at least not in the grand scheme of things. Her peers certainly thought Moon was strange, but then children were never exceptional at taking a good look at the big picture. Moon was, on the whole, average, not that this provided any comfort to her.

It was midnight. A cold breeze sauntered through the empty streets, not strong enough to be upgraded to 'bracing' but still just the right temperature to sting the cheeks. Snowflakes danced in the air, diamond dust that only added to the inches of accumulation on the ground.

Moon was outside.

Again, not unusual. Nighttime was perfect for the moon to be out.

She stuck her tongue out, catching ephemeral flakes that became drops of water in the blink of an eye. Winter was her favorite season. The battle between light and dark at nighttime was all the more stark during the coldest months, with the pure white snow pushing up against the pitch black sky. She loved the sensation of feeling warm-yet-cold: bundled up to her ears in coats, hats, mittens, and boots, and still feeling the bite of the frigid air on her face.

A bag hung from Moon's shoulders, its weight so familiar that she had to check occasionally that it was still there. Mostly, it was filled with knickknacks that she'd picked up while wandering – interestingly-shaped rocks, soda can tabs, coins that had long since lost their luster. The prize of her collection was a single Pokeball, unused, as pristine as the ones they sold in stores, as long as she ignored the chips and scrapes. She'd found it one rainy night, gently floating down a makeshift stream towards the gutter. She'd snatched it up mere moments before it would have disappeared forever into the sewers.

The only sound in the night was the crunch, crunch of Moon's boots, two sizes too big for her, through the snow. On winter nights, Moon's favorite route to take led her down the remnants of what she called the 'old road' – a winding path that led down to the abandoned viaduct over the lake. The old road was overgrown with weeds and ivy during the rest of the year, but during the winter the plant life receded, leaving only a walkway littered with rocks.

Moon sat at the edge of the viaduct, looking down at the gleaming surface of the lake. It had been frozen over for a few days, and snow had collected on the surface in some places so thickly that it looked just as solid as the ground. Around the edges of the lake, where the forest sprung up, Moon could see quick flashes of motion, doubtless some nocturnal Pokemon going about its business.

Then, a noise. A soft, urgent trilling from below her. Moon craned her head down, straining to hear it more clearly. It had the cadence of a Pokemon cry, but it wasn't one she recognized, and it was coming from the snow drifts piled up on the ice.

Moon jumped to her feet and took off running along the viaduct back to solid land. She slid down the slope towards the lake, boots skidding through the snow, as the plaintive crying grew ever louder. Her pace slowed as she approached the shoreline itself; she knew better than to take unnecessary risks around a frozen-over lake, not after what had happened the year before.

She extended a foot, setting it gently on the ice. No cracking noises. The second foot followed, also with no warning signs. Moon let out a breath and took step after plodding step until she reached the snowdrift emitting the noise. She dug through the snow, powder sticking to her fuzzy gloves and moisture seeping in to her hands, until she found…

A Ditto.

Moon had seen pictures of Ditto before and knew what they were supposed to look like, but this one's normal pink coloration had faded away; it was nearly blue with cold. It was covered in scrapes and bruises, and it struggled anemically in the snow pile, barely able to move.

"It went this way!" came a call from the road. "Don't let it escape!"

Moon's ears perked up. She didn't know what was going on, but she knew that whoever the voice belonged to wasn't happy. "Are they looking for you?" she asked in a whisper.

The Ditto didn't respond, its shivering growing too strong for it to do anything else.

"Don't worry," Moon said. "I'll keep you safe." She unzipped her coat and drew one arm up through her sleeve; with her other hand, she tenderly lifted the Ditto from the snow. She cradled it against her chest, then zipped her coat back up and tucked the end of the empty sleeve into a pocket. It was a trick she'd learned out of necessity – she could hide things in her coat safely, while from the outside, nothing looked out of the ordinary.

An adult appeared at the top of the hill as Moon began the climb back up. "Hey, kid," he said, his voice as sharp and as cutting as a razor's edge. "You see a Pokemon come this way? Small. Pink."

"No, sir," Moon said, her words nearly lost in the wind as it picked up.

"Speak up. Don't mumble."

The command was a refrain Moon knew well. "No, sir," she said, louder this time, as she felt the Ditto trembling in her arm.

The adult examined Moon's face. Moon didn't know him, but she knew what he was doing. Everyone assumed she was lying all the time, and they thought that if they watched her, if they looked really close, they could catch her. The problem, of course, was that Moon rarely lied. She hadn't seen the money that had gone missing – she'd only seen the person running away from the store. She didn't know what happened to someone's lost bottle cap collection – she only knew about the bottle caps in her bag, but those were hardly lost, since she knew exactly where they were.

Nobody ever asked Moon what they actually wanted to know, which bothered Moon to no end. The man in front of her was no exception – the Pokemon she held in her arm wasn't pink, not after so long in the cold, and she certainly hadn't seen it come that way. Even if he had asked the right question, though, Moon wouldn't have answered it, not this time.

Moon always gave what she thought was the honest answer. This time, though, was different. She would have lied.

The man backed up, a scowl crinkling his marred features. "Well, if you see it," he said, off his stride, "you come and let me know." He left her and rejoined the trio he'd split off from, making it once more a quartet before disappearing into the night.

Moon watched him go, then began following the old road back to town.

The Pokemon Center nurse was in the middle of a yawn as Moon entered. "Evening, and welcome to the Pokemon Center," she said, adding something under her breath that sounded like "now make this quick."

Moon unzipped her coat and held the Ditto up to the nurse's eye level. "Can you help it?" she asked, her voice, though quiet as always, cutting through the Center's relative silence. The Ditto still shivered, albeit not as strongly as before, and every so often a whimper escaped its mouth.

"What happened to it?" the nurse asked, all traces of sarcasm gone from her words as her training kicked in. Without waiting for an answer, she gingerly took the Ditto from Moon and opened a door leading to the Center's back room, then motioned for Moon to follow.

"I don't know," Moon said, which was the truth. "I found it like that."

"Hm." The nurse placed the Ditto on a cushion atop an examination bed, then draped an appropriately-sized blanket around it. Only its eyes were visible from the gap in the folds. "Without knowing what it went through, our best course of action is to see how it reacts to some medicine and go from there." She snapped her fingers and suddenly a Chansey was _there_ , right beside Moon, setting down a tray stacked with Super Potions and Hyper Potions. "Thanks, Lucky," the nurse said; the Chansey disappeared from the room just as quickly as it had appeared.

The medicine did the trick, and soon the Ditto was sleeping soundly, swaddled in its blanket. "You don't have to worry," the nurse said to Moon. "It's in good hands."

"I'm not worried," said Moon. She remembered a time when she opened her eyes in a hospital, with no familiar faces anywhere to be seen. She remembered what it felt like. "I just want to be here when it wakes up."

The rest of the night quickly gave way to day, and as the morning light peeked in through the Pokemon Center's windows, the huddled mass under the blanket began to stir. Moon leaned against the examination bed and stroked the blanket with one hand; the blanket began falling away, revealing the Ditto's briefly-befuddled face. It plainly didn't know where it was at first, but upon seeing Moon, its expression softened and it let out a chirp.

"Good morning, little one," Moon said, smiling. "Are you feeling okay now?"

The Ditto chirped again and pushed its head-analogue against her hand.

Moon didn't understand what it was saying, but the intent was clear. "You're welcome. I'm glad you're feeling better." With a squeak, the Ditto hoisted itself onto her arm and climbed up to Moon's shoulder, prompting a fit of giggles. "What are you doing?" she asked. "Do you want to come with me? I was just going to find a place to let you go…"

The Ditto hugged the side of her head, which told her everything she needed to know.

"Well, okay then!" Moon slid her backpack off and dug through it until she came up with the dinged, damaged, pristine Pokeball and tapped the Ditto with it.

Nothing happened.

After another moment of nothing happening, the Pokeball creaked open, revealing inner mechanisms that had long since been torn apart.

Moon's face fell. "It's busted? Aw, that's no good," she said, carefully picking the Pokeball back up and trying to close it without hurting it more. She slipped it back into her backpack. "I guess you and I can still hang out together, even if I can't catch you, right?"

The Ditto shifted up and down in a crude approximation of a nod.

Moon clapped her hands together. "Yay! Okay, then you'll need a name!" she said, looking up towards the ceiling as thoughts rushed through her head. "Um… Ditto uses Transform… they copy other things… Copy… Co-py… Co-py, py, py, I got it! I'll call you Pete!"

The Ditto squeaked and nuzzled up against her.

"Yeah, that'll work. Pete," Moon continued. "Then if I ever catch another Ditto, I can name it… well, you know."

The Ditto didn't know, but it didn't mind.


	9. Cryptic Territory

"I want my objection to this plan on the record, boss."

"Noted."

"I'm being serious. This is a bad idea, and I want no part in the blame when it blows up in our faces."

"I said 'noted', Repeat. What more do you want from me?"

"I want you to not be doing this, but I don't think that's in the cards. Why is this the plan we're going with? How do you even know that it's that piece of amber you have to get? All we're going on is Hyacinth's hunch and two dots that you happened to connect!"

Mel shook her head. The sun had long since set, casting all of Pewter City in the grays and blues of night. The moon provided the barest hint of light, enough for Mel to be able to see through her binoculars from her perch in a nearby tree. "I can't explain it," she said, watching the path one of the museum's guards took around the building. "I just know. This is something that just feels right."

"Uh-huh." Repeat clung to Mel's backpack, trying to ignore the piercing gaze of a Spearow less than a foot away. "Is it going to just feel right when we get arrested for breaking and entering?"

"We're not going to get arrested. At least not if everything goes right."

"Of course we'll be fine _if everything goes right!_ That's what 'going right' means! I'm worried about when things _don't_ go right!"

"Repeat, hush." Mel's words had an air of finality to them that Repeat wasn't used to hearing. "You think I don't know what could happen? I don't like doing this either. But I'm pretty sure this is the right call, and I'm sorry I can't tell you why. Unless you got a better idea rolling around in your head, this is what we gotta do. Now, you're a real important part of my plan, so if you wanna make sure we don't get caught, best thing to do would be to help. Are you in? Or are you just gonna sit there and complain about it?"

Repeat fell silent, at least for a moment. "I'll help," he eventually said. "We've got each other's backs. That's how it works, for good or for bad."

"Thanks, Repeat," Mel said, craning her head back and flashing a warm, genuine smile. "I swear. I'm gonna live up to your trust in me."

"Don't make promises you can't keep, chief," said Repeat, but he too was smiling.

Mel returned to her vigil. The patrol around the museum was light, and she suspected it had been that way for a while. Ever since the Rockets had fallen after their sieges on Silph Co. and then on the Goldenrod Radio Tower, thanks to a procession of blindingly competent children, the region hadn't seen the sort of unrest that plagued other areas. Sure, the Galactics in Sinnoh and the Magmas and Aquas in Hoenn had far-reaching effects with their attempts to harness the power of legendary Pokemon, but the Rockets had only wanted money – and since they'd disappeared, Kanto and Johto had been at relative peace. Seeing the local mafia get thrashed by a pair of preteens from out in the sticks had a way of making other would-be criminals wary.

There were three guards circling the building. Each one wore the same uniform and had matching flashlights. They obviously had their watches in sync – they stopped at set locations around the building in time with each other, then after a few minutes began their patrol again. Every so often, one of them would mutter something into a radio, prompting responses from the other two.

The patrol was regimented, but it still left significant gaps. Since there were only three guards, even with them spread out, there were plenty of places Mel could slip in without notice. She slipped down out of the tree without making a noise and watched from a bush as the guards stopped in place at their specified locations.

One guard stood at the front door to the museum, one stood around the back, and one stood at the eastern door that led into the back offices. There was exactly one door that remained uncovered: a closed, locked door on the western side of the building, used for loading and unloading, if _A Relentlessly Thorough History of the Pewter Museum of Science_ was to be believed. Mel crept up to it and knelt down, setting her backpack on the ground and picking Repeat up. "Okay, Repeat, it's all you," she whispered.

Repeat nodded and eyed the door from his place in Mel's hands. It was a simple pin and tumbler lock, the kind that he and Mel had practiced opening many times before – sometimes hurt Pokemon were holed up inside locked buildings, abandoned or otherwise, and couldn't get themselves out. He squished a pseudopod into the lock and gently shaped it so that it lifted the pins to just the right height. There was a series of faint _clicks_ and Repeat turned the lock.

"Good job with part one," Mel murmured, grabbing her backpack and letting Repeat climb up to her shoulder. "Now we just…" She turned the knob and opened the door just a hair.

In accordance with the law of dramatic timing, an alarm went off.

It only took moments for the nearest guard, the one around the back of the building, to appear; he threw open the door, one hand on a Pokeball set into his belt. Once he saw the person on the other side, though, he shook his head and relaxed his posture. "Dr. Fawcett. What are you doing back here so late at night?"

The other party involved in the conversation, a tall, strongly-built, tawny-skinned woman wearing a lab coat and an embarrassed expression, laughed sheepishly. "Oh, you know, left some important papers here. Wouldn't you know it, I forgot the passcode to turn off the alarms! Silly me! Forget my own head if it weren't attached."

The guard clicked his tongue disapprovingly, but punched in a rapid-fire series of numbers into a console near the door. The alarm immediately turned off. "You really need to be more careful, doctor," he said, turning to leave. "I almost thought you were trying to rob the place. Next time, just let one of us know before you come in."

"Oh, you know!" Dr. Fawcett trilled as the guard turned to leave while muttering something into his radio. "I didn't want to be a bother!" Once the guard had left, she let out a breath, then ducked into an office near the door. A backpack had been tossed in there, and Fawcett slid off her lab coat, hanging it from the hook she'd found it on, before picking the bag back up.

Fawcett's face – her entire face – began to ripple and change color, and then, seemingly without any transitionary state in between, it was a Ditto, one that jumped to her shoulder. Mel's face was underneath. "I think we actually pulled it off, Repeat," Mel muttered. "That went perfectly."

"Don't get complacent, boss," said Repeat. "You're just lucky that one of the staff here had the same kind of build and skin tone as you. Remember that time at the Celadon Game Corner?"

Mel scarcely needed to be reminded. They'd tried to sneak into the Game Corner's rewards center on a tip that an injured Pokemon had shut itself in there, but when Repeat tried his mask trick, they'd unintentionally chosen a person much smaller than Mel to imitate. It, to put it kindly, hadn't worked. "Yeah, yeah," Mel said. "I don't think it'll work twice here anyway. Someone's bound to notice that Dr. Fawcett is acting weird. Plus, even if we got a disguise on, I don't think they'll like us taking the fossil."

The patrol inside the museum was about as light as outside – only a couple of guards, haphazardly dotted through the exhibits. Mel's path to the Ancient Rarities exhibit was clear, and all she had to do once she was there was keep quiet and avoid the occasional flashlight when the guard for the wing stuck his head in.

"There it is, Repeat," Mel whispered, so low that she could barely hear her own words. "The amber. Let's grab it and get outta here."

"Boss?" Repeat hissed into Mel's ear. "What's the plan if there's an alarm or something attached to the fossil?"

"Then we grab it and get outta here, but faster."

"I don't like this plan."

"I know. Ready?"

"As I'll ever be."

With slow, patient steps, Mel approached the stand.

"Boss," Repeat whispered.

She slowly lifted one arm.

" _Boss_ ," said Repeat, more urgently.

Her hand neared it, shaking almost imperceptibly. Then it was within reach. She brushed her fingers along the cool surface, then took the entire thing into her grasp. Sparks lit up the darkness around the stand, emanating from where her skin made contact with the rock.

" _Boss!_ What are you doing?!"

Flashing red lights broke Mel from her reverie, and a heartbeat later she became aware of the siren sounding. She turned her hand palm-up. The Mega Stone sat in it. _How did I…?_ she thought.

Repeat tapped Mel on the back of the head. "Chief! Get moving! Someone'll be here any minute!"

"Right." Mel slipped the Mega Stone into her pocket, then palmed the amber and took off running.

The guard posted nearest to the western wing of the museum wasn't used to excitement, not anymore. His name was Harles Aristotle, pronounced air-is-tote-lay, which nobody ever got right, and he was an immigrant from the sun-baked region of Orre. After Orre's liberation from the Cipher criminal organization, Harles decided to move to a place that was altogether calmer before some other crisis reared its ugly head. His background as a security specialist gave him a foot in the door to a job as a guard in a museum in a sleepy town secluded away from the rest of the region.

It was, he had thought, perfect. And, for a time, it was.

Then Mel happened.

The alarm system was old and, frankly, outdated, but Harles hadn't minded the lapse up until that day, when he realized how nice it would have been to have had some kind of indication which sector of the museum the alarm had been triggered from. After making sure he hadn't had a heart attack from the sudden noise and lights, Harles asked a frantic question into his radio, only to find out that nobody knew what was going on. The only event that evening that had been out of the ordinary was one of the other guards having to disable the door alarm for Dr. Fawcett, and nobody had seen her since.

Then Harles saw her – a figure, one who looked vaguely like Dr. Fawcett, running out of the western wing. Harles endeavored to catch up to her, a tall order for a man who hadn't moved at a clip above 'leisurely' for years. "Ma'am!" he said in between breaths. "Ma'am! Hold on!"

The figure turned to him, and Harles realized with a start that she was in no way Dr. Fawcett. Fear and annoyance in equal measures flashed through the intruder's eyes, and she changed direction; Harles, completely unintentionally, was blocking the route out. She veered without warning for the stairs to the second level, and as she bolted away from him, Harles saw for the first time the Ditto clinging to her backpack.

Had Harles been a quicker-witted man, he might have been able to start putting together the pieces about then. As it was, though, he could only focus on not keeling over.

"Where are we going, chief?" Repeat said, holding on for dear life.

"Anywhere where there isn't someone chasing us!" grunted Mel, vaulting over a display of space rocks and ducking down behind it, giving herself a moment to get her bearings. Nobody was immediately on her tail, but she could hear footsteps coming up the stairway. Her first instinct, when she ran into the guard downstairs, had been to immediately change course, but she'd ended up on the second floor, which offered precious few escape routes.

Then Mel saw the shuttle. And past it, the window.

"Repeat, I have an idea."

"Oh no."

Space shuttles – or, more precisely, space shuttle replicas – were a mainstay of the museum, according to _A Relentlessly Thorough History of the Pewter Museum of Science_.The one currently on display, though, was the first one that patrons could actually go inside, which the directors had hoped would make it a bigger draw with younger guests. This turned out to be a flawed plan, as the shuttle had to compete with the allure of ancient skeletons, a notorious crowd-pleasure; despite that, the museum administration elected to keep the new replica on the grounds that it was too expensive to build for them to just get rid of. So it stayed, though in deference to new exhibits it had been pushed to the side to make room. The practical upside of this was that, since the shuttle had entrances on either side, while one door opened into the exhibit, the other opened right next to the bay window.

Before any other guards could follow her upstairs, Mel crawled across the floor and flung herself inside the shuttle, closing the hatch after her. "Quick, Repeat," she said through clenched teeth.

Repeat nodded; he'd caught on. He clung to the window set into the hatch and began to change. Ordinarily, trying to transform from memory was a no-go for him – he had to have seen the target recently, like in the case of Dr. Fawcett, who they'd gotten a look at when she left work that day not long before they broke in. But Repeat didn't need to memorize what he was trying to turn into this time.

He turned dark.

The footsteps Mel had been hearing coming up the stairs finally reached them. She couldn't see through the window anymore, but light streamed in through the hatch's seal – a flashlight. Her fists clenched and her fingers dug into her palms as a silent prayer bounced back and forth inside her head, wishing to anyone that would listen that her plan worked – that all the guard would see would be blackness behind the window, and that they wouldn't think anything of it.

The light disappeared.

The footsteps faded.

Mel breathed out. "Okay, Repeat, let's get out of here," she said. Repeat peeled himself off of the window; as he relaxed, his coloration returned to his normal pink. Mel quietly opened the other hatch, the one facing the wall, and from there unlatched the window. She held onto the ledge, lowered herself outside as far as she could, then let go. It was murder on her legs and knees, but it was far from the first time she'd had to make a drop like that.

With the museum guards still searching fervently for her, Mel disappeared into the night.

Mel didn't stop running, awash in a cloud of Repel, until she'd cleared Diglett's Cave and made it safely to Vermillion City. By then, the sun was already peeking over the horizon, a vivid pink and orange reminder that Mel had gotten no sleep. She sat on the pier, her back against an unused post, with her backpack next to her and Repeat in her lap.

"Are you feeling okay, boss?" asked Repeat, concern written across his face. He stole occasional glances at the mouth of Diglett's Cave, betraying his worry that someone was still coming after them.

"Yeah… yeah, I'm good." Mel dug through her pocket and drew out the Mega Stone; the amber was next, pulled from her backpack. She held one in each hand. The two were about the same size and weight, but those were their only similarity.

"Good. I don't mind telling you, I never want to do that again."

The familiar response – "Hey, we're alive, aren't we?" – boiled up inside Mel, but she bit her tongue. All she said, in spite of herself, was, "That's probably a good call."

If the sudden low-key answer surprised Repeat, he didn't show it. "You know when everything's over and done with, we have to return these, right?"

"I know." Mel held both stones up to the morning light. The amber glimmered, its natural color enhanced by the sun, but the Mega Stone only seemed darker, heavier. She could almost see sparks dancing around its surface.

"Hey. Chief." Repeat morphed a pseudopod into a rough facsimile of a human hand so that he could snap his fingers in front of Mel's face. "Don't go spacing out on me again. What made you take that with you, anyway? What happened?"

Mel felt a chill run up her arm, originating from the stone. "I…" she started before pausing. "I'm not sure." She was loathe to elaborate further: that her actions hadn't felt like her own, that she couldn't have stopped herself. "I think… I think the museum was wrong, though."

"How do you mean?"

"I don't think this is Aerodactylite. It's something else. Something big." Mel slipped the stone back into her pocket, trying to ignore the crackling sound it made when it left contact with her skin. "It feels… important."

Repeat frowned. "Boss, you're starting to slide into cryptic territory."

"Sorry, sorry. I mean something's up with this rock, whatever it is. And it just so happened to be right next to the amber that the Unown told me to get. I kinda get the feeling that maybe this rock is the one we were supposed to find all along." Mel felt the comforting weight of the stone in her pocket, coolness radiating out from it.

"And that doesn't… worry you or anything?"

"Oh, no, Repeat. What this rock was doing to me? That worries me more than anything else right now. But this…" Mel stopped and collected her thoughts. _Yeah. This is right._ "This is how it's supposed to be."


	10. Easier than Expected

"40,000 bucks? Are you _serious_?"

"Small price to pay for saving the life of a creature of legend, chief."

"Yeah, you say that, Repeat, but I don't see you shelling out the money."

"Some might say that me not having money gives me a unique perspective on its value."

"Some might also say that you're just cheaping out on me. Fine. Here. 40,000. Let's hope I don't need to buy anything for the next couple'a months."

The cashier took Mel's money with a smile that Mel considered just slightly too predatory and handed over a single disc, contained in a plastic jewel case that was itself in a plastic bag. Mel stared in the bag as she and Repeat left the counter and sighed. "For how much this cost, they could have at least made the jewel case outta actual jewels," she muttered. "40,000 bucks. That's like 100 burgers. This single CD could have fed me for a month."

"Sure, boss, if you wanted to eat burgers three times a day." Repeat clung to the back of Mel's head, trying not to grin and failing miserably.

"And what if I do? Burgers are good. You got your meats, your grains, plus they even have veggies, fruits, and dairy on 'em. Eat a burger and you got all of the food groups, right there."

"What kind of fruit are you eating on a burger? Are you about to tell me that applewood-smoked bacon counts as an apple?"

"Tomatoes, you dope. Honestly, I'm not a _total_ idiot."

"I dunno, boss. Even an idiot would know that tomatoes count as vegetables when they're being cooked." Repeat stifled a snicker.

Mel rolled her eyes and tossed her backpack down onto the floor, next to a plushly-cushioned bench under a row of bay windows. "Now I _know_ you're winding me up. A tomato's gotta be one or the other. You can't say it's some weird half-fruit, half-vegetable."

"Whatever you say, boss."

Sun spilled into the building, casting Mel and Repeat in a golden light. It was a beautiful morning, the kind that was all too rare – a pure blue sky, a hint of a crisp breeze drifting in through an open window, and even faint birdsong drifting through town. They'd made it to Saffron City after taking a day to sleep, after which Mel felt much more alive, and they'd immediately gravitated to the place mentioned in Hyacinth's notes – the head branch of Silph Company.

Admittedly, Mel wouldn't have needed to rely on Hyacinth's hypothesis to head for Silph in the first place; in a city that already dwarfed all of its neighbors, Silph's building stood well above the rest, ruling the skyline with a stark silhouette. Not only did Silph run all of the Pokemarts in the country, they manufactured products that got sent all around the world and were used by nearly everyone who so much as had a Pokemon in their general vicinity. As a result, they bore a not-inconsiderable amount of name recognition and had, in the years since their founding, done some rebranding.

Gone was the looming, industrial Silph, full of scientists and engineers that had such an ethical deficit that they sided with the Rockets during their siege – and full of incompetent, money-hungry executives who treated their employees so poorly that the Rockets were seen as the better option. In its place was the sleek, streamlined Silph, completely transparent and dedicated to improving the world, at least according to their mission statement. In actuality, the executives were still quite enamored with money and the rumors of sketchy experiments still surrounded the company, but they'd put a happier face on it. Silph had even, and this was the real turning point, opened their own store on the first floor of their head office in Saffron, one that sold exclusively Silph-made products. Critics initially slammed Silph for the move, since Pokemarts were roughly 90% Silph merchandise already, but Silph's sales shot through the roof; apparently, making the store 'cool' and 'hip' and 'totally embarrassing to not be seen at' was just the thing to ensure products would fly off the shelves, no matter what they cost.

The Silph Store, branded with only the Silph logo on the door, was where Mel had paid 40,000 big ones for a single CD, and it was where she'd found a seat under an open window to examine her purchase.

"'P-Upgrade, v2,'" Mel read off the receipt as she set the plastic bag it came in next to her. "This is it, I guess. Gotta say, this was easier than I expected."

"Don't jinx it, boss," said Repeat. He hopped down to the cushion and pulled the jewel case out of the bag, struggling to hold something that was almost half his size. "We don't know if this is going to work yet. And even if this is the right thing, we still need to get it back to wherever it is the Unown wanted us to take it."

"Let me have this, Repeat. After everything we had to do in Pewter, I'm glad we can just walk in and buy something we need, even if it did cost an arm and a leg." Mel turned to eye Repeat and, by extension, the CD. "In fact, I… I think…" She reached out her hand slowly, brushing her fingertips across the jewel case, leaving sparks dancing across its surface.

From behind the jewel case, Repeat couldn't see what happened. "Boss? You okay?"

"Oh! Ah, sorry." Mel shook her head, squeezing her eyes shut to try and make the stars in her vision disappear. She grabbed the CD and stuffed it back in the plastic bag, then into her backpack. "Yeah. Yeah, I'm fine. No big deal. Look, let's get outta here. We've got some research to do, and I for one am not looking forward to it."

"Research, you say? Perhaps I might be able to assist you in this endeavor."

Mel looked up – and she didn't have to look very far. A person in a trench coat stood before her, and it was only because Mel had met them before that she knew that they weren't three kids stacked on top of each other. "Hyacinth? What're you doing here?"

"Well," said Hyacinth, transparently grinning even though Mel couldn't see their mouth, "in an immediate sense, I'm offering my aid in your research-based quandary, for which I may only wish to ask a favor further in the future." Apparently sensing the words that were about to come out of Mel's mouth, they continued. "But I suspect that is not the intent behind your query, hm? No, rather, the reason behind my presence in this city today is because I have gathered evidence that one of the two organizations that I am currently investigating is, as one might say, 'up to something.' I only wish to find out what the something is to which they are up."

The wave of words washed over Mel, leaving her momentarily stunned. She focused her attention on Hyacinth's mind, but only got the same aspirations of helpfulness that Hyacinth perpetually gave off. "Wait, who's in town?" she asked, once Hyacinth's statement had time to sink in.

A notebook appeared in Hyacinth's hand and they began leafing through it, scanning each page at lightning speed. "The information I have thus far collected indicates that Genesis intends to conduct an operation somewhere within the city limits."

Mel shivered. The image of Degree Absolute and the rest of her cronies standing at the pier, waving at her, leapt into the forefront of her mind.

"Granted," Hyacinth continued, "Saffron City is not, well, small. Deducing their movements at this point, now that I am already within the borders, will be more difficult. However, I began my search here, at the Silph office building, simply because I suspect it presents the most temptation for organizations with malicious intent – as evidence, I offer the Rocket raid on this very location."

"You must be a blast at parties, Hyacinth," Mel said once she had sifted through Hyacinth's verbal onslaught.

"I wouldn't know. I rarely attend parties."

"Ah." With a rustle of fabric, Mel stood up, sliding her backpack on. Repeat took the hint and climbed to her shoulder. "Look, not that I don't like seeing you, but if Genesis is around here, I think it's high time I wasn't. They're a bit too, uh…"

"Dangerous? Criminal?" Hyacinth prompted.

"Creepy for my tastes. Plus, I'm pretty sure I personally ticked off their head honcho. So come find me once all the heat dies down and we can get cracking on this research stuff. I'd tell you where I'm going, but I bet you could find me either way." Mel approached the store's entrance, opened the door, stared outside for a moment, then gently closed the door before rejoining Hyacinth. "Change of plans."

"Allow me to posit a guess," said Hyacinth. "Agents of Genesis are just outside the door?"

"Yep. Think it would be a bad move for me to dive out the window instead?"

"Hm, I would assume so. I expect that would be significantly more noticeable."

The lights in the store turned out in unison, prompting a wave of quiet gasps that rolled through the shelves of merchandise. "Attention, Silph Store patrons," squawked an intercom set into the ceiling, "the exits have been sealed. This is a routine exercise. Please do not attempt to leave the building."

Mel scanned the room, her height giving her clearance over the shelves that Hyacinth didn't have. "Some of the customers are freaking out," she muttered low enough that only Repeat and Hyacinth could hear her. "But the guy at the register isn't. He looks perfectly calm. So either this legit is some bizarre thing the Silph Store just does sometimes…"

"Or," Hyacinth finished, "and I think this is significantly more likely, this is the Genesis operation and he is a plant."

"Right. So what is it they're trying to do, exactly?"

"I wish I had that information for you." Hyacinth pocketed their notebook and rolled a Pokeball in the palm of their hand. They tugged at the brim of their hat, the simple motion symptomatic of the touch of nervousness that Mel felt swirling around them. "I'm afraid that I know precious little about their goals as of yet, which is not a state in which I relish being. With that in mind, Miss Rylan, what would you say about conducting a little active investigation on our own terms?"

"I'd say we might as well get to it, Hyacinth."

* * *

It had been years upon years since the Rocket siege on Saffron. They had slowly infiltrated the city, growing their numbers and their influence, until they had enough people on the inside and the outside to take control of the Silph building wholesale. After that, all it took was trapping the Saffron gym leader and her subordinates in their gym for the entire city to be under Rocket command. The Elite Four's own non-interference pledge, wherein each member of the Elite Four promised not to use their considerable power to weigh in on local matters for fear of wielding undue influence, complicated matters further; in fact, the Saffron siege was the reason for the nullification of said pledges. As quickly as three years later, Lance, then the champion of the Elite Four, was seen taking action against the Rockets in Johto.

Since then, even with the threat of the combined powers of the Elite Four contributing to the lack of major crises in Kanto and Johto, Silph had decided to beef up their own security. Guards were hired onto company staff, more cameras were installed, and the networking expert Bill was even brought in – he designed a system where sensitive and valuable items could be whisked away across the network to a secure location, just like his Pokemon storage system, in the event that the company found themselves threatened. Bill stayed onboard with the company afterwards, being one of the only people in the region who could reliably troubleshoot the networking devices.

Gone were the days when Bill had accidentally combined himself with a Pokemon due to his own rashness and inexperience. Now, Bill was head of the technology services division in Silph, with salary and benefits to match.

Mel had heard of Bill before – who hadn't? His Pokemon storage system had been the norm for as long as she could remember, built upon and enhanced by other engineers in other regions; from the basic version where trainers could store only so many Pokemon in a box before having to manually swap boxes at a Pokemon Center, to boxes swapping automatically, to the abolishment of boxes altogether, to the entirety of the storage system being accessible through any networked device, letting trainers trade out the Pokemon on their team at any time. What Mel hadn't known were the details of Bill's employment, but she had learned all of that and more when she and Hyacinth had stumbled across his office.

The idea had been simple. Mel and Hyacinth would sneak through the building, scoping out exactly how far Genesis had gotten and where they were trying to get to. Much to Mel's confusion, though, nothing seemed to be going on. The lights had gone out throughout the building, but that was it. Nobody roamed the halls except security guards – and a flash of Hyacinth's badge had been enough to convince them to let Mel and Hyacinth continue their search. But they'd found nothing.

At least, they'd found nothing until they happened across an otherwise-nondescript office bearing Bill's name on a placard. Hyacinth looked at the name, looked at their notes, looked back at the name, then knocked on the door, and Bill had eagerly welcomed both of them in once Hyacinth explained the situation.

Bill stood only a hair shorter than Mel and he was dressed in a rumpled powder-blue suit sans jacket, one that might have looked daring on anyone else but on him just looked like all of his other suits were in the wash. His wavy reddish-brown hair was streaked with gray, but his eyes were bright and lively, with a fire behind them that made him look younger. "Nice to meetcha!" he said cheerfully, a trace of a Goldenrod accent under his words, as he welcomed Mel and Hyacinth in. Mel didn't need her abilities to pick up on his nervousness; though he tried to mask it, his voice wavered up and down. "I only wish it was under, y'know, better circumstances."

"Certainly, sir," Hyacinth said. Mel let her gaze trawl across the office; it was a disaster area of a workplace, with stacks of papers piled haphazardly between boxes of machine parts. A half-built device taller than Mel was stood against the wall opposite them, its guts spilling out onto the floor. "I'll get right to the point," continued Hyacinth. "As you are one of the higher-ranked people here, I would like to ask you a few questions concerning current events."

Bill nodded, taking a seat in a plush swivel chair and spinning around in it once before coming to a stop. "Fire away."

Hyacinth's questions had been pointed, but Bill had expounded on them far more than Mel had expected, and soon she found herself with more knowledge of Bill's history than she ever cared to have. Nothing Bill said seemed particularly helpful to her, but Hyacinth on the other hand wrote down every word with no small degree of satisfaction. "Thank you, sir," said Hyacinth. "That was very enlightening. I feel like I have a better image of what exactly might be going on here."

"You do?" Mel asked, her eyebrows arched. "Because I'm lost. Mind filling me in?"

"Certainly, Miss Rylan, though I would recommend that we table this discussion for now. I believe our current course of action ought to be to evacuate the building as quickly as possible – the two of us and our esteemed colleague here."

"What?" exclaimed Mel and Bill simultaneously.

Hyacinth slipped their notebook into a pocket and approached the door. "Indeed. So let us depart."

The door flew open before Hyacinth could lay hands on it, and they backed up. In the hallway stood two people in off-white robes, one of whom Mel recognized as the muscle-bound man whose form Repeat had borrowed to help escape their hideout in the Sevii Islands. "Bill?" the other person, an altogether smaller man who bore the confidence of someone who knew they had very large backup, asked.

"Y-yes?" Bill stuttered, his eyes wide.

"I'm going to have to ask you to come with me. Your… services are required."


	11. Poison Rationality

Mel scanned the room. The only points of exit were the door that was currently blocked by two members of Genesis and the window on the opposite wall that was several floors above the ground. The fact that the window was looking like a semi-decent alternative at the moment said something, Mel thought, about the state of her options.

"I ain't goin' nowhere with y'all!" Bill spat, his accent fully surfacing. His hands were shaking, Mel noticed; a voice in the back of her head, unconcerned with the present danger, wondered if his accent came out in times of stress. There was certainly enough of it billowing off of him. "I tripped the silent alarm for security the minute y'all kicked the door in!"

The smaller of the two Genesis men looked to the larger before both of them burst out in laughter, though the big guy's laugh, Mel reflected, sounded more like two boulders being scraped over each other. "Security won't be a threat," he said. "Our operatives have been sweeping the building, neutralizing every agent they came across. This is a delicate task we're undertaking. Wouldn't do to get… interrupted. Now, Bill. If you please."

Hyacinth cleared their throat. "I think I've have quite enough of the two of you being vaguely threatening at us," they said. "Dozer, let's do this." A Pokeball appeared in their hand and they released a familiar Snorlax, one that dwarfed everyone else in the room. "You know what to do."

Dozer did indeed know what to do, and she jumped into action as quickly as a Snorlax could have reasonably been expected to. With scarcely any apparent effort, Dozer picked up the smaller Genesis agent and threw him bodily down the hallway before grappling with the bigger one.

"Mel," Hyacinth said, their glasses gleaming. "Now is your opportunity. Make your escape. Once you and Bill have gotten to safety, I will locate you."

"Don't gotta tell me twice." Mel grabbed Bill by the wrist and, after making sure Repeat was holding on tight, took off running out of the office, away from Genesis.

Back when the Silph Co. head office had been built, the president of the company had spared no expense in making sure that he hired only the best architects – the building was going to be a "shining beacon in a sea of glimmering commerce," he said. And hire the best architects he did – but his plans came to a confused halt when every single person working on designing the building suddenly fell severely ill within three days of each other. The president of Silph was then forced to go with the only other architect in the area available on short notice: "Sickly" Bilden Bridges, the legendarily contagious self-proclaimed 'best property designing person' who, in a stunning coincidence, had been seen recently shaking hands with all of the other architects on the job. Bridges was known for, aside from his sub-par immune system, his avant-garde approach to design; he'd been quoted as saying, among other things, that "right angles were for losers and squares." When it was pointed out to him that right angles had to be for squares, since by definition a square had to have a few right angles kicking around somewhere, he simply smiled, tapped the side of his head, and walked away.

The Silph Co. head office had no internal cohesion. Offices were nestled within offices. Every single lock could be opened with the same key. The president had almost the entire top floor to himself, but his suite wasn't accessible from the elevator or the stairs. And then there were the teleporters.

Mel had already accidentally run on top of three different teleport pads. They activated as soon as they sensed pressure without any sort of confirmation from the person being teleported, which Mel thought had to be a violation of some kind of code, especially considering they were still working somehow, implying that the power was still running even if the lights were cut. She'd ended up in a storeroom, daylight spilling in through an open window, old books and binders crammed onto wall-to-wall bookshelves. She took a peek out the window; from how far away she was from the ground, she guessed that they were at least on the fifth floor, if not further up.

"Where are we?" Mel hissed, creeping towards the storeroom door. It was locked by an electronic key, so there was no getting out that way, but she could just barely hear footsteps on the other side.

Bill shrugged. "I dunno."

"What do you _mean_ you dunno?"

"Whaddya want me to say?" Bill growled, running a hand through his hair. "My office is right off an elevator. So's my labs. I never use the teleporters if I can help it. They're great for transportin' Pokemon and items around, but as far as gettin' around the building? Not a good system! I never memorized where each of them goes!"

Mel pressed her ear against the door. "Real useful, buddy. Now do you or do you not got a way we can get outta the building from here?"

Bill grit his teeth, his fists clenching and unclenching. Mel had seen those behaviors before, and they would have worried her if they weren't coming from a man who, to put it kindly, looked like Dozer would have had no issues throwing him down a hallway. "Why would I know that?" he said. "I dunno where we are, and I dunno who's waitin' for us on the other side'a that door! Are we on the floor where the offices don't lead to the elevator? Are we inside some dumb nesting doll of storerooms? I got no idea! All I know is that I wanna strangle the guy who decided this was a good way to make a building!"

"Are you done?" Mel asked, her voice quieter than Bill's. "If you're not, can you hand over your key before you start running your mouth again? I'd like to get a look at what's around us."

Bill opened his mouth, but then apparently thought better of it and pulled a small card out of his wallet. "Here," he muttered. It had his picture on one side and Silph's logo on the other.

Unobtrusively set into the wall next to the door was a scanner; Mel knelt next to it, held the card in range, and it let out a quiet beep.

The door slid into the wall.

A person stood on the other side, her hand raised, holding a card key.

She wore a purple coat and had cropped white hair.

Mel's eyes widened, and she scanned Bill's card key again.

The door closed.

"Okay, we need to go _now_." Mel sprung to her feet.

"What? Why?"

"The worst person in this building is right on the other side of that door, and we need to go anywhere else that isn't here, because I really don't want to deal with—"

The scanner beeped again, this time from the other side.

The door slid open.

The woman in the purple coat strode inside, her hands folded behind her back. Her boots, steel-toed, echoed throughout the room with every step.

"Degree Absolute." Mel half-sighed, half-spat the name. "Great. Wonderful. Just who I needed to see."

Degree's lips curled up in a snake's smile. "You remember me. I'm touched." Her voice was low and steady; her words might have sounded sarcastic coming out of anyone else's mouth, but from her they sounded deceptively sincere. Her mind radiated iron confidence, complete assurance in herself, with not a single trace of doubt or concern.

Even before Degree could say anything else, Mel shuffled backwards, sprung to her feet, and vaulted to the teleport pad. "Move, Bill," she growled. "Get your tail through that teleporter before I drag you in myself!"

"Now, now," said Degree, raising her hands conciliatorily. "There's no need for that." Two figures appeared on the teleport pad in a burst of light – both wearing off-white robes. They were bigger than Mel, and she ran headlong into one of them, unable to halt her momentum. As she stumbled back, she reflected on just how much it had felt like hitting an uncomfortably fleshy brick wall. "Why don't you stay and have a chat?" Degree continued. "We've got a lot to talk about."

Mel's eyes darted back and forth between the door, blocked by Degree, and the teleporter, blocked by the Genesis goons. The only other way out was the window, and she didn't like her odds with that. "Keep it together, boss," came Repeat's voice near her ear.

"What do you want from me?" Mel asked, looking at Degree with narrowed eyes. Standing up straight, Mel had at least a few inches on Degree, but something about Degree just made Mel feel… smaller.

Degree extended a hand in a gentle gesture. "Verdant, would you care to answer this question?"

One of the two Genesis grunts straightened up. "Yes, ma'am! We are here for one reason! We require Bill's services!"

"And to that end…?" Degree prompted.

"Yes, ma'am!" the other grunt said. "Without further discussion, we will retrieve Bill!"

"Wait, what—" Bill yelped as the first grunt, Verdant, placed hands on his shoulders. Mel made to tackle him, but the other grunt stood in her way as Bill and Verdant vanished, the teleporter zapping them away.

The moment after Bill disappeared couldn't have been longer than a heartbeat, but to Mel it felt like eternities passed; the teleport pad was _right there_ and if she could only get to it, she could follow them, get Bill back, get out of the building, but the grunt in front of it—

Degree snapped her fingers, her hand only inches from Mel's face. "Come back to us, please," she said, wearing the same smug smile. "You're spacing out, and we can't have that. Not when we've so much to discuss. To begin, I'm afraid I can't let you wander around anymore."

Mel slowly turned her head, scanning the room. Part of her head was screaming at her, condemning her for letting someone else get taken, for not being quick enough on the draw. The other part was consumed entirely by thoughts of escape, trying to figure out how to get out of the situation, to just leave and collect her thoughts somewhere nobody could get to her.

"Ostrum? Please wait on the other side of the teleporter," said Degree, punctuating it with another snap of the fingers. "There are some things I wish to discuss with our guest one-on-one."

The remaining grunt nodded and stepped back onto the teleport pad, vanishing in an instant. The pad itself dimmed slightly, an indication that someone was standing on it on the other end, keeping it occupied; that particular safety feature had become necessary after one too many incidents where someone unintentionally teleported into someone else. _There's that escape route gone,_ Mel thought.

There was only silence for a moment. The storeroom buzzed with tension; Mel could have sworn that she felt pressure pushing in on her skin from Degree's presence alone. A bird – a Pidgeotto, from the sound of it – chirped somewhere outside.

"I recognize," murmured Degree, "that since it is now only the two of us here, you may be tempted to try and force your way past me. I would recommend against it. At least, not before we've heard each other out… Melanie Rylan."

The blood in Mel's veins turned to ice. One thing she had been very certain of was that she had in no way given Degree her name.

"It was trivial to find information on you. You're a public figure, after all. One of my followers recognized you from some advertisement you did some time ago, unflattering though it may have been. Now, do not be concerned," Degree said, doubtlessly seeing how wide Mel's eyes had gotten. "I do not wish harm to befall your family or anything like that. I simply had to know who our uninvited guest was. Dropping in through the roof! What an entrance."

Mel gently stroked Repeat. The nervousness emanating from him matched hers perfectly. "Get to the point," she said, scowling.

 _Clack. Clack._ The sound of Degree's boots against the floor pounded through Mel's head, making her flinch almost imperceptibly with each step. Degree walked past her, towards the window; she leaned forward, arms braced against the window frame, looking out over the city. She breathed in deeply, relishing the fresh air from outside. "I find myself interested in you, Melanie," Degree said.

"Um…?"

"Who are you? By all accounts, you're a nobody." Degree extended a hand outside the window, and a Pidgey settled next to it and pecked gently at her palm. "A gofer at a Pokemon shelter. A worthy pastime, to be sure, but hardly someone destined for greatness."

A frown crawled across Mel's face. It was bad enough that Degree had caught her alone in a storeroom, but surely the insults were unnecessary.

"And yet, and yet," Degree continued, completely serene, "we find ourselves bound together. I don't believe it to be a coincidence that you and I both found ourselves here today. Some would call it fate, I expect, but I find it difficult to attribute it so when there is a far easier explanation." She stood up straight, stretching her arms out above her head, as the Pidgey flapped away under the noonday sun.

Mel crossed her arms and endeavored to look as defiant as she could, an attempt to mask the fear running up and down her spine. "Oh yeah? What's that, then?"

Degree ignored the question and came within reach, her gaze not on Mel but just past her. She lifted her hand, reaching towards something Mel couldn't see… at least not until Mel realized that she was going for Repeat, making an attempt to scratch him under the chin-analogue that turned out futile when Repeat morphed a mouthful of teeth to try and bite her. "Repeat. That's what you call your Ditto, yes? A good name for it, I think. Plus, it has the benefit of being a synonym of its species designation. Wonderfully apt."

"Don't touch him." Mel yanked her shoulder back and took two quick steps away, putting distance between them. "Look, I dunno what your deal is, lady. You keep dancing around the point. What do you want from me?"

A light breeze rolled in from the window, billowing Degree's coat out around her; Degree, for her part, looked like she was used to this happening. "Nothing. Except to talk, that is, and I think we're having quite the lively discussion right now."

Mel could feel her jaw clenching. The frustration was beginning to bubble up, fighting with the dread for real estate in her mind. "What 'discussion'? What 'talk'? All you've done is talk circles around me! You haven't actually _said_ anything other than that you know my name and that we're connected or whatever!" She stomped forward, grabbing hold of the lapels on Degree's coat. "Why do you care about talking to me so much? What makes me so special? What is going on?!"

"Melanie, please, let's keep it civil." Degree brushed Mel's hands off as easily as she would leftover crumbs. "I'm not sure I would call those the _right_ questions to ask, but you obviously feel strongly about them. I suppose we can digress for a moment." She fixed Mel with a piercing, lavender-eyed stare. "I know what you're doing, Melanie. I know what your goal is. You and those… thugs from Neo Rocket. You all wish to find the Mew-child for reasons I can only guess at. You don't need to look so surprised, by the way," she added, cutting Mel off from interjecting. "Your friend Hyacinth Harley is not as subtle as they think, and their so-called 'secure channel' that they used to speak with their client… well, let me just say that we could eavesdrop easily enough. We know all about you, Melanie Rylan. We know about you, and your family, and your friends. We know the steps you've taken that brought you here. And _that_ is why I find myself entangled with you: you and I, we both intend to find the Mew-child. Of course we crossed paths. It could scarcely happen any other way."

A hard lump began forming in Mel's throat. She swallowed. It did not go away.

Degree spread her arms as the wind picked up. "Genesis has people all over Kanto, Melanie. Not _many_ people, if I'm being truthful, but enough that we can watch. Collecting information isn't only the domain of private investigators in trench coats."

"I… I won't let you kill the Mew-child!" Mel spat. She knew it lacked presence, but it was all she could get out of her mouth. The room felt ten degrees colder than it had when she came in, and she felt her hands shivering.

"Oh, Melanie. Poor, sweet Melanie. This isn't a matter of what you'll 'let' us do. Wheels are now in motion. At this point, with Bill in our fold, our ultimate goal is already assured. And let me be absolutely clear: I know you will still try to stop us. Your history speaks to that. You can't let a Pokemon suffer, no matter what. That's what makes me interested in you. So I know you're still going to track down the Mew-child, out of some misguided notions of 'protecting' it. And we, Genesis, will be watching you every step of the way."

"Why?" said Mel. "What's your game? I don't believe for a second you buy into all that nonsense about the Mew-child being unholy, or whatever it is."

Degree advanced on Mel, her coat whipping behind her. "Even if I didn't, why would I tell you? No, Melanie, I'm afraid I do 'buy into all that nonsense.' But you would be mistaken to think that my goals end with the extermination of that pitiable offspring." She was only inches away from Mel now, and she leaned in even closer, her mouth at Mel's ear. "Think about this," she whispered. "If the Mew-child dies, who might appear afterwards?"

Mel stumbled backwards, and the part of her mind focused on finding an escape route finally won out over everything else. _I need to get outta here, and I need to do it_ now _._

So she jumped out of the window.


	12. Reconnecting

Septimus Reus, author of the eponymous collected journals, prided himself on his attention to detail; even minutiae like variances in pronunciation of the name Suicune around the world warranted ample documentation. In contrast, he only had one page devoted to the topic of jumping out of windows. It started with "No no no no no" and kept on in that vein for roughly three paragraphs, during which he experimented with different letter sizes, capitalization, and even what looked like a brief foray into writing with his non-dominant hand.

Once he got that out of his system, Reus went on to say, "If someone is reading my notes, undecided on whether or not to jump from a window, and has gotten this far, then that person clearly has already made up their mind one way or another. With that in mind, best of luck to you, hypothetical person. Tucking your head in and rolling gives you a slightly better chance at survival."

Mel had a different strategy, and hers was squishy, pinkish-purple, and roughly the size of her head. The window was open, she was thankful for that much, and Repeat, almost as if reading her mind, caught on to her plan immediately. She'd heard bird Pokemon milling about the Silph Co. building, and after she hurled herself out into the open air, Repeat transformed into one such Pokemon – a Pidgeotto. As they drifted towards the outskirts of the city, Mel could see Degree's rapidly-shrinking face in the window.

Degree was laughing.

The breeze blew Repeat and Mel out to the route between Saffron and Celadon. Mel could never remember the designations of each route, but she knew that the one they were landing on was one of the smallest in Kanto. A skulk of Vulpix scattered into the tall grass as they landed, Mel's feet alighting on the ground first before Repeat transformed back to his usual form and dropped into her arms. Mel tried to will her heart to stop pounding, but her mind kept straying back to Degree's face right up next to hers, to Degree's voice in her ear, to Degree just… laughing at her.

"We will be watching you every step of the way..." Mel said quietly as she stared up at the silhouette of Silph Co. in the distance, Degree's words echoing through her head.

"What was that, boss?" asked Repeat. He shook his head as if clearing his thoughts; Mel felt relief in his mind.

Mel slid her backpack off and sat against one of the broad trees that lined the path, the bark rough against her back even through her shirt. "Oh… nothing, Repeat. I just… I mean, I…" She swallowed. The words wouldn't come. How could she express the dull horror that was running through her, settling in the pit of her stomach, that Genesis would be watching her? Following her? That anyone she met could be a devotee of Degree Absolute? That not only had Janine been taken by Neo Rocket and then refused to recognize her, but now Bill was gone too? She'd needed to protect him, protect _them_ , that was what she was supposed to do, but when it came down to it, she fell, she ran away—

A semi-solid pseudopod gently clapped her cheek. "Boss," Repeat said, in a quiet voice that nonetheless cut through the fog in Mel's mind like a knife. "Come back to me."

"I… sorry." With her eyes closed, Mel inhaled slowly through her nose, then let it out through her mouth. "Right. I'm here. I'm okay."

"Well, I'm glad to hear that!" The voice wasn't Repeat's, and that, plus a noise like something dropping from the leaves of one of the nearby trees, made Mel's eyes shoot open. A slight woman knelt before her, wearing ratty clothes that hadn't been improved by her time in the branches of a tree. "If you weren't here, I'd have to start wondering real hard about where you were, kid."

"Hello, Nia." Mel didn't bother to hide the acid dripping from her words as she tried to slow her heartbeat once more. It worked about as well as it had a few minutes prior, which was to say 'not very'. "Should I even ask how you keep finding me?"

"Hah! You're out here making it sound like I'm following you around or something!" Nia said with a toothy grin.

Mel's eyes narrowed.

"Fine, fine." Nia waved a hand dismissively. "For real, though. I like climbing trees. Gets me closer to the sky, you get it? So I'm just taking a break, you know, from important business, and decided to see what I could see from the canopy around these parts, and hey presto, here you come crashing down outta the air. When I finally meet Fate face to face, I'm gonna have to shake her hand for putting us in each other's way so much!"

"Important business?" Mel asked flatly. She had to admit, even as much as Nia could wear on her nerves, it handily beat dealing with Genesis. "What kinda 'important business' are you dealing with, anyway?"

"Oh, this and that, that and this. But enough about me!" Nia leaned forward on the balls of her feet, her smile growing slyer. "I gotta know. Why the aerial escape? No, no, wait, lemme guess. You jumped outta the Silph building or something, am I right?"

"In one." Mel rolled her eyes. "You're gonna say it was a lucky guess, I bet."

Nia clapped her hands triumphantly and rocked back onto her heels. "You get me, kid! Honestly, there's some bad vibes coming outta Silph right now, so I figured you might'a had something to do with it."

' _Bad vibes', huh? I wonder_ … Out loud, Mel said, "Yeah. It's Genesis. And their boss, who just gets creepier every time I run into her."

"Degree Absolute is no joke," Nia agreed, her tone suddenly more somber than Mel had been expecting. "Never met someone so… unreadable before. I've had a few run-ins with her myself, you know."

"I bet. Last time I saw you was right after you were in her hideout. And now you're out here, real close to where she's popped up again."

"Why, whatever are you implying?" asked Nia, an innocent smile on her lips.

Mel rose to her feet, making sure Repeat was holding on tight. "I didn't think I was _implying_ anything. That would mean I was being subtle about it. But I'm sure you'd just deny it anyway." She let out a breath. "Whatever. If you're here to be vague and arcane at me, then just go ahead and get it over with so you can leave me alone. I got stuff to do."

With an affected look of pain on her face, Nia held her hand to her chest. "You wound me! I'm starting to think you don't like my company, kid."

"Can't imagine why."

"Look, all I'm gonna say is, be careful with Degree Absolute. She's every bit as nasty as the one in charge of that other group giving you fits."

Mel's curiosity got the better of her. "You mean the Neo Rockets? All I've run into are grunts. Who's running the show?"

"They say it's some guy called No.1," Nia whispered conspiratorially.

"Real creative naming scheme they got going there."

Nia stifled a giggle and continued. "The guy never leaves his base, apparently. Issues all his commands remotely. The kinda guy who's ten steps ahead of everyone else, and everything that happens is part of some master plan. That's what I hear, anyway."

"Hmph," Mel grunted. "It's hard to argue with that. They already captured Janine, and if they're brainwashing a gym leader, they must be on top of their game."

"Seems that way, huh."

Mel's face wrinkled into a scowl. "I know that tone of voice. What else aren't you telling me about them, Nia?"

"Me? Nothing!" Nia put her hands up in front of her, radiating innocence. "That's all the information I've got for you."

"Uh-huh. Then why don't you leave me alone? I gotta go find someone and deliver some stuff."

Nia offered up a wide smile, one that glinted in the daylight. "Whatever you say, kid. Be seeing you!" She jumped into the boughs of a nearby tree and climbed off, with only the rapidly-dwindling sound of movement through leaves hinting to her location.

A long silence settled on the route before Mel pressed her fingers to her temples. "Ugh," she muttered. "She always gives me a headache. Wonder if I've got any aspirin on me."

"I got you, boss," Repeat said, digging through Mel's bag. He reemerged with a small pillbox; Mel took two of the capsules inside and swallowed them dry. "So we need to find Hyacinth next, right?"

"Right." Mel nodded. "I'm hoping they got out of the building okay. They did say that they'd find us once we got out, so I wonder if that means we should stay where we are, or if we should try and put some more distance between us and Genesis—"

"That will not be necessary, Miss Rylan." A figure in a trench coat stepped out of the gatehouse that straddled the border between the route and Saffron. They tugged the brim of their hat lower, partially obscuring their glasses. "I am pleased to see that you made it out of Silph Co. unscathed, though it is quite disappointing that we failed to keep Bill from harm."

"You're telling me, Hyacinth." Mel exhaled slowly, trying to keep her thoughts from racing away once again. "They caught me by surprise. Cornered me."

Hyacinth sidled up alongside Mel and reached up to hesitantly pat her on the shoulder. "I don't believe it was your fault, Miss Rylan. There is only so much two people can do against so many. We shall simply have to overcome this situation from a different angle."

"I guess so." Mel looked up to the sky. It was mid-afternoon, and the sun was continuing its slow march towards the horizon. A breeze rolled through the canopy, sparking a cascade of rustling. "I'm glad you're here, Hyacinth," said Mel.

Hyacinth beamed.

* * *

"So you believe you've found the items indicated by the Unown?"

"Yep. Check it out." Mel, Repeat, and Hyacinth sat around a table in the corner of the Celadon Pokemon Center, where they were pretty certain nobody would bother them. The sun was beginning to set, and the normal visitors to the Center were already gone; now, there were only traveling trainers looking for a quick heal or a room for the night. Mel opened one of her backpack's many pockets and emptied it onto the tabletop; a single plastic bag containing a CD jewel case slid out first, followed by two stones that clacked together then rolled to a stop.

Hyacinth's glasses glinted in the fluorescent light. "Ah, just as I suspected. This appears to be a piece of amber, perhaps with remnants of an ancient Pokemon inside… and here we have a Silph Co. product. An Upgrade for Porygon, if I'm not mistaken. I am pleased to see that my hunches were able to help you. But what is this third item? This… is this a Mega Stone?" When Mel didn't respond, Hyacinth looked up from the tabletop. "Miss Rylan?"

Mel stared at the table, the items there all drawing her focus. Her backpack slipped from her hands, rolling off of the table and coming to a rest on the floor; she reached her hands out, one to the CD and one to the Mega Stone. Pale sparks jumped between them and her fingertips as the distance grew smaller, and Mel's eyes widened, her pupils shrinking.

A slap across the face from Repeat was all it took to break Mel from her reverie, and he swiveled around to face Hyacinth, giving a shrug as if to say 'this happens sometimes.' Hyacinth didn't seem to care; they had their notebook out, scratching out notes as fast as their hand would let them.

"Sorry, sorry," Mel grumbled, shaking her head and trying to clear the last cobwebs from her mind. She shoved the rocks and the CD back into her bag before she could look at them any longer.

"Is that something about which I should be concerned?" asked Hyacinth as they returned their notebook to a pocket.

"No," Mel said, ignoring Repeat's vigorous nodding. "I'm pretty sure it's okay."

"'Pretty sure'?"

Mel leaned forward, bracing her arms on the table. "Look, don't you start with me too. I get enough from this one here," she added, pointing with her thumb at Repeat. "The way I see it, if the Unown wanted these things brought out to wherever I'm supposed to bring 'em, and I'm the one who's supposed to do it, then it makes sense that there's some weird mystical stuff going on with 'em."

"I suppose that makes a certain kind of sense," Hyacinth mused, their hand at their chin, as Repeat slapped his forehead and made an assortment of grumbling Ditto noises. "It is not a phenomenon with which I am terribly familiar, though I hasten to add that preternatural artifacts on the whole are a topic that frequently confounds me. More to the point, though, let us discuss the location to which the items must be taken."

Mel dug through her backpack and pulled free a crumpled scrap of paper – the one that Hyacinth had left her, bearing the transcription of the Unown's message. "Sounds good to me. 'The isle where life begins,' that's what the Unown said. The problem I got with that is, don't most isles got life on them? And if there's life, it's gotta be born somewhere. So there's a lotta isles that could be called a place where life begins, right?"

A loud thud echoed through the Center as Hyacinth let a doorstopper of a book drop onto the table, though Mel could only guess where they'd been hiding it. It was weathered and ragged, and it looked like in its long life it had been through more fires than it cared to count. The only words on its cover were 'Atlas of the World', and then, underneath that in smaller type, 'In Excruciating Detail.' "Ordinarily, Miss Rylan," said Hyacinth as they opened the book about halfway and started flipping pages, "I would find myself in agreement with your conclusion. However, in the time after our encounter with the Unown, I conducted some independent research into their words. Strictly out of personal curiosity, you understand."

"Oh, of course," Mel said with no detectable hint of sarcasm.

Hyacinth stopped on a page displaying a single, triangle-shaped island and turned the book around to face Mel. The artist of the map had illustrated it as mostly being covered in low grass and barren soil, with only a few scrubby trees standing out. A monolithic boulder, also shaped like a triangle, rose from the center of the island; either it was enormous or the island was tiny, and Mel couldn't tell which. "My investigation led me to this map. If you would be so kind, direct your attention to the name at the bottom of the page."

The text was small enough that Mel had overlooked it at first, but it was there, written in a floral script. Mel read it out loud. "Birth Island…"

Hyacinth tapped the side of their head. "I see you understand the significance. From what I have found, Birth Island is part of the Sevii archipelago, though due to its small size and relatively infertile conditions, it remained uninhabited. Now, very few even know of its existence; its appeal is mostly to those in pursuit of rare Pokemon, since it was rumored that a Pokemon from space made landfall there some time ago."

Mel pulled the book across the table towards her, squinting at the map. "Abandoned island out in the middle of nowhere, weird unexplained stone pillar, tied to legendary Pokemon. Honestly, even if the Unown hadn't basically spelled out the name of the place for us, I'd put money down on this island anyway. _Something's_ going on there."

"My thoughts exactly." Hyacinth grinned. "As it happens, I was hoping you agreed with me, since I took the liberty of arranging another favor for you."

"And all you're asking is a favor in return somewhere down the line, right?" Mel rolled her eyes, but she smiled back. "Shoot. What'd you get set up?"

* * *

"See, when I asked you what you'd set up, I was sorta expecting a guide or something. Not a private ferry right to the island."

"What can I say, Miss Rylan? The owner of Seagallop owed me a favor, one that he has now repaid with aplomb."

The ride to the Sevii Islands was much faster than the ones Mel had had in the past; the ferry, likewise, was slicker and sleeker. "Must have been a doozy, whatever you did for him," Mel said, leaning atop the deck's railing and watching the ocean pass by. Repeat sat inside her backpack, looking up at the sky.

Hyacinth stood next to Mel, though their height meant that they couldn't lean over the railing so much as against it. "Let's just say that some people take it very seriously when you locate their lost Sentret for them."

"Can't say I don't understand that."

A blast from the ferry's horn signaled their arrival as the shore drew in to meet them. Birth Island was, in fact, quite small, and Mel could see clear to the opposite shore from where she stood. The stone monolith was no longer a feature of the island, but otherwise the map of it had proven quite faithful. Except for…

Mel squinted, trying to see the far shoreline more clearly. "Hyacinth, are there other boats over there?"

"Hm." Hyacinth adjusted their glasses. "Yes, now that you mention it, it seems we are not alone. How curious."

One of the boats looked to be a simple motorboat, hardly big enough for more than a pair of people at most, but the other was slate gray and looked like it would have had no problems sinking beneath the waves and traveling that way. An entrance swung open on its side, and from it spilled a group of people, all wearing identical gray outfits.

Mel's blood chilled to ice in her veins. Neo Rocket had beaten them there.


	13. The One Left Standing

"Hello? Hello? Can you hear me?"

"Whoa! Who is that? Who's there?"

"Oh, I'm so glad! I've been trying so long to talk to you!"

"No, for real, who are you? What's going on?"

"Before I can answer that, how'd you end up getting here?"

"Um… I was on a boat. A ferry. And we'd just hit shore at Birth Island. And we saw those Neo Rocket guys there at the same time. Then… then… "

"Take your time. Try your best to recall."

"I jumped out of the boat, and then…"

* * *

Mel jumped out of the boat, clearing the railing in a single leap. The water was bitterly cold, sinking straight in to her bones, but she cleared the distance from the ferry to the shore in what would have been record time for her had she been keeping track. Repeat clung tight to the back of her head, and she could feel him shivering every time the wind whipped the water into a spray.

Soon, Mel could feel the sand beneath her boots, and she ran up onto the shore without even bothering to dry off. The Neo Rockets were marching towards the center of the island, all of their steps perfectly in sync with one another. There were seven of them, and Mel recognized four: the two who she'd seen on the night of the Venomoth Festival ( _that feels so long ago now,_ she thought; _so much has happened since then_ ), the one who'd called herself No.2, and… Janine, No.8. Mel's heart skipped a beat, but she forced it steady; there was no time to repeat what she'd done in the Tanoby Ruins.

But there was someone else, too, running up behind the Neo Rockets – a woman with rust-red hair and a pace that spoke to the fire fueling her. Even from a distance, the look in her eyes made Mel flinch. Izzy was on the scene, and she immediately let fly a Pokeball that opened and dropped an Exploud squarely in the middle of the crowd of grunts. The Exploud opened its mouth and let out an almost-visible sound wave, the force of which scattered the grunts to the ground. It was enough to make Mel clap her hands to her ears, even as far away as she was.

Mel took the opportunity to close the gap between her and Izzy, neatly skipping over an assortment of prone bodies. The blast hadn't thrown them for very long; a chorus of groaning rose into the air as the Neo Rockets began the laborious trek back to their feet. "What're you doing here, Izzy?" she hissed, then repeated herself after facing her when she remembered that Izzy couldn't hear her.

"Took a lot of work," Izzy signed. "But I tracked them down. The Neo Rockets. I found their ship right as they were leaving port. Followed them here." She paused her signs a moment to crack her knuckles, the meaning of which was abundantly clear even to Mel. "And now, here, where they can't run away from me, I will crush every single one of them. I will stop them from causing any more harm."

"O-oh."

* * *

"Why didn't you say anything else to her?"

"Look, if you haven't met Izzy… Let me put it like this. When I ran into her the first time, she punched a stone wall hard enough to leave a dent and played it off like it was nothing. So when she started talking about crushing people, I didn't want to do anything that would put me on the list of people who needed to be crushed."

"Ah, I understand. Please, keep going. What happened next?"

"Well…"

* * *

The Neo Rockets regrouped, forming a semi-circle around the Exploud, who immediately backed off towards Izzy, waiting for a command. In all of the grunts' hands were Pokeballs – all of them, Mel noticed, except for No.2. In a split second, all of the Pokeballs opened and six Pokemon appeared. Mel recognized the Hariyama as the same one that had pounded Repeat into a puddle, but it was far from the only formidable Pokemon in the lineup. Alongside it were an Exeggutor, turning this way and that so all three of its heads could see what was going on; a Scyther, running the edges of its blades along each other; a Lopunny, hopping from foot to foot; an Absol, keeping its steely gaze fixed on the Exploud; and… Janine's Venomoth.

Izzy extended an arm, barring Mel from going any further, not that she was inclined to. "You stay out of this. You'll only get in my way."

A Pokeball arced over Mel's head and released the hulking form of a Snorlax, coming nearly eye to eye with the Hariyama and dwarfing everyone else. "I would be loath to phrase it so, but I find myself in agreement with our colleague," came a voice from behind Mel. "I think, perhaps, you might wish to use the items you brought with you while we keep these miscreants at bay." Hyacinth took their place beside Izzy, nodding in acknowledgement at her and Mel both.

Even though her first instinct was to argue with Izzy, Mel bit it back. "On it," she said, backing away from the group.

"Subject cannot be allowed to escape," droned No.2. She gestured to the other grunts. "Dispose of these enemy combatants, then intercept." The others nodded as one and began issuing their orders to their Pokemon. The Hariyama grappled with Dozer, fighting for control; Dozer's eyes glowed a brilliant blue, then she released a Psychic blast that knocked the Hariyama aside. The Lopunny was next; it sprung nimbly out of range of each of Dozer's blows before darting in to land quick strikes. Each one individually didn't seem to faze Dozer, but the Lopunny could land several hits before Dozer could even launch an attack. Meanwhile, the Scyther, the Exeggutor, the Venomoth, and the Absol all had their attention focused on the Exploud, but were keeping their distance; the Exploud, for its part, seemed likewise reluctant to approach. Izzy, evidently tired of keep-away, signed a command to the Exploud, who let fly a sound wave strong enough to tear up the dirt underneath it. It plowed into its foes, who scattered like bowling pins.

Mel slipped away, dropping her bag underneath one of the long-dead trees that stood near the edges of the island. "They seem to have this under control," she muttered to Repeat.

"Yeah, boss," said Repeat. "Don't ever get on their bad sides. That's what I'm taking away from that."

"I'm pretty sure I'm already on Izzy's bad side."

"I don't think she has a _good_ side."

Mel chuckled as she emptied her bag out onto the ground. Only one pocket was open, so the only things that came spilling out were the CD, the amber, and the Mega Stone, not that she was certain that it was even a Mega Stone. "Okay," she said under her breath. "I got them here. Pretty sure these are the right items, pretty sure this is the right place. So what do I do with them?"

"Remember what happens every time you touch them, chief?" Repeat said, perched on her shoulder.

"You think I should just… let it happen?" asked Mel. "Aren't you usually the one snapping me out of it?"

Repeat made a shrugging motion. "Maybe it's what needs to happen now. I can't think of any other way you'd use a rock and a CD together."

Mel swallowed and closed her eyes, reaching out her hands until she'd grabbed all of the items – one stone in each hand, and the Upgrade carefully clasped in between her index and middle fingers. She could feel the sparks erupting from them, and pictures of all three of them formed in her mind – as clear as if she was looking at them herself. Emotions ran high around her, threatening to sweep her up entirely, from all of the humans and Pokemon nearby – she could feel the anger and determination rising off of Izzy and her Exploud and the ever-present desire to be helpful from Hyacinth and Dozer, but she could even sense something welling up below the surface in the Neo Rockets. _Wait_ , she thought. _Just one of the Neo Rockets. It's coming from… from No.2. What is…_ She shook her head. _No. Can't get distracted._

The rocks and the CD sent an electric jolt up her arms and down her spine, and Mel felt a familiar sensation, one she recognized from every other time she'd held them – the feeling of standing at the edge of a hole into the world while stars danced around her, of being drawn into a darkness that was nevertheless so bright it nearly hurt, of wanting to just let herself drop and fall in and let the universe envelop her—

Mel fell forward, the items still clutched firmly in hand.

* * *

"Do I have to explain the next part? I mean, you were there for it, kinda."

"If you don't mind? I just want to be sure we're both on the same page, if you get what I mean."

"If you say so."

* * *

Mel opened her eyes. She didn't recognize her surroundings, she knew that much – lush, grassy plains, much more alive than the island she had been on moments ago ( _was it moments? It feels like it could have been an eternity_ ), spread as far as she could see in every direction. Trees, flush with vibrant leaves and plump fruit in a rainbow of colors, dotted the landscape, and they were just the right size for climbing. The breeze that ambled past her was cool but not cold, the exact right temperature, and the sun was creeping over the horizon, filling the sky with a comforting golden light.

"Isn't that something, Repeat," Mel said, shaking her head with a disbelieving smile. "I dunno where we ended up, but this is beautiful."

The only sound that followed was the rustling of grass shaking in the gentle wind.

"Repeat?" Mel asked. She reached up to her shoulder, to her head, to her backpack – only to find that not only was Repeat missing, but so was her bag. "Oh," she said, more quietly. She closed her eyes and tried to extend her senses further out from her, searching for any sign of anyone else nearby – Repeat, Hyacinth, even Izzy – but got almost nothing. As far as Mel could tell, she was completely alone – aside from a vague hint of a presence further away than she could see. It was far enough away that she couldn't even tell what it was, much less what emotion it was feeling, but it gave her a place to start. She started walking.

The walk was long, longer than Mel could even keep track of, but she never felt herself get tired. The burning weariness that liked to set into her legs when she went on hikes never materialized. She had no way to tell how much time was passing – the sun rose and hovered in the sky above her, but it seemed to be going in the wrong direction and moving too slow anyway.

Eventually, the sky began to darken – not from the sun setting, but from clouds that only appeared when she wasn't looking. They were light and fluffy at first, but soon grew heavy, ominously black. "I don't like the looks of that, Repeat," Mel said, only remembering his absence after silence set in again.

Still triangulating her path using the distant mind she could feel but not identify, Mel climbed to the peak of a hill, decorated with one lone apple tree, as the wind picked up around her. For miles around, the same landscape dominated, but one oddity stood out to her.

The clouds, the dark, evil-looking ones, weren't blanketing the sky indiscriminately. They led somewhere, and Mel would have bet money that they were leading the same direction her psychic sense was taking her. She hoisted herself into the tree's branches, trying to get as much height as she could – and then she could see it.

Set into the side of another hill, far away, was a cave. The clouds weren't emanating from it, but they all seemed to be pointed in that direction.

"Well, Repeat," Mel said, fully aware that he was nowhere to be found, "I guess we know where we're headed, huh."

She would have given anything for him to answer back.

* * *

"Aw, you miss your partner, huh?"

"Hey, shut up."

"No, no! I'm not poking fun! I think it's great that you and Repeat are so close."

" _Anyway_ …"

* * *

Mel arrived at the cave only to find its opening completely sealed – a metal door covered the whole thing, and it refused to budge no matter how much Mel pulled on the handles. "Dunno why I thought that would work, Repeat," she muttered, and her mind almost filled in the snappy retort on its own. "This door is locked up tight, and on top of that, it's got all these thick metal chains across it." She halfheartedly plucked at a chain, one of several that spanned the width of the cave's mouth. "What am I supposed to do now…?"

The presence Mel had been following was the strongest she'd felt it, and she had a hunch that if she could only open the door, she'd see whatever it was sitting right behind. Getting nearer to it had done little to inform Mel as to what the presence was, though, and part of her was harboring some bitter resentment that she was essentially back at square one.

Then, she heard the voice.

"Hello? Hello? Can you hear me?"

It echoed inside her head, zapping straight to her brain without going through her ears.

* * *

"And the rest you know," Mel finished. She was speaking out loud, in contrast to the voice's resonance inside her mind, and she'd made herself as comfortable as she could by sitting on the grass, her back against the door. "Now I did what you asked. Mind telling me what's going on, exactly?"

The voice didn't say anything for a moment that let Mel listen to the wind whip around her. The door was set a little ways into the mouth of the cave, so Mel was protected from the elements, but she could still feel her stomach lurching with every gust. "I know you asked," the voice eventually said, "but you've probably got your own guesses as to who I am, right?"

The thought had been circling in her head the entire time. Mel nodded. "You're… the Mew-child, aren't you?"

"That's right, chief."

Words tumbled over each other, fighting to get out of Mel's mouth. The first one to make it was "Wow." This was followed shortly by "I'm supposed to protect you! What's going on? Where is this? And how can I get you out?"

"I am sealed away, as you've figured out," the Mew-child said. Its voice was young-sounding, but there was a weariness in its words that suggested lifetimes of tragedy. "This place is a… projection of where I am confined. The items you found allowed your mind to reach mine, if only for a moment, and by doing so, you've weakened the seal some already."

Mel looked over her shoulder at the door incredulously. "This is what the door looks like when it's already weakened? Musta been a fortress to begin with."

"Something like that. Look, I fear we don't have much time. If you can release me, I will be safe. I know it," the Mew-child said, its voice taking on a pleading tone. "But only you can do it. The others… they can't be allowed to get to me. Their plans are…" It shuddered. "I don't know what their plans are, but I dread finding out. Nothing good."

"I'm…" Mel tripped over her words. "I'm trying my best, but how do I get you free? What do I have to do? And why is it only me that can? Why am I special?"

"It's because—"

* * *

Mel's eyes snapped open.

She was back on Birth Island, under the tree.

Her hands were empty. The items were gone.

Her senses returned to her in a flash, and she took in her surroundings.

The Neo Rockets' Pokemon lay collapsed on the dry soil, all of them except for the Absol. The Absol stood alongside No.2, and together the two of them held the fossils and the CD. Another Absol – who Mel immediately realized was Repeat – crouched about midway between her and the Neo Rockets, not yet fainted but still injured. _The Absol stole them,_ Mel thought, _but it had to fight its way through Repeat first._

Dozer and the Exploud were also knocked out, and Hyacinth and Izzy knelt near them, and from how bruised and battered they were, Mel guessed they must have taken some blows too – but not without giving as good as they got, since all of the Neo Rockets themselves, save for No.2, were unconscious.

"The subject is awake," No.2 said, and it was enough to make Mel jump; underneath No.2's mask, she could feel… emotion. Barely-constrained rage, lighting No.2 up like a bonfire. But also… amusement? _Is that what that is?_ "Well then, Subject Mel. I am pleased to see you," No.2 continued, despite her emotions telling a different story. "Your… friends… here fought as hard as they could to protect you. However, it was pointless." Her voice was still a careful monotone, even as her emotions boiled off of her. "I am the one left standing. And I have yet to exhaust all of my options."

"Repeat," Mel called. "Are you okay? Can you keep going?"

"Sorry, boss," Repeat groaned. "They got me pretty good."

No.2 extended her arms, a gray Pokeball in each hand. "It is just as well. You would not be able to stand up against this. Tell me, Subject Mel. I suppose you have figured out that brainwashing is a key part of our team's formation."

Mel grit her teeth and narrowed her eyes.

"Have you wondered how the act is done? How we remove memories? Erase emotions?" No.2 shook her head. "It is elegant, really. Allow me to demonstrate." She tossed the two Pokeballs to the ground, and a Pokemon emerged from each of them.

The two Pokemon looked superficially similar – they were both only about a foot tall and they both floated in the air; their elfin bodies were blue-gray and they had a pair of slender tails each that ended in a red jewel. The only difference came in their heads: while they both had yet another red jewel in their foreheads, one had a pinkish-purple face and the other's was yellow.

Mel knew what they were, though she'd never seen them in person before. How could she have? They were two of the guardians of Sinnoh – Uxie, the spirit of knowledge, and Mesprit, the spirit of emotion.

No.2 pointed a finger towards Mel. "Attack," she said.

The two legendary Pokemon followed her command immediately, firing twin Signal Beams that struck Mel in the chest. She was thrown backwards and collided with the tree before slumping back down to the ground.

Mel's vision began fading. She could hear voices at the edge of her consciousness, and she tried desperately to hold onto them, but they slipped away as soon as she processed them.

"Miss Rylan! Hold on!"

 _That's Hyacinth_.

"Hey! Boss! BOSS!"

 _And there's Repeat…_

"You must stay the course, Mel. Only you can do it!"

 _And that is… that is…_

… _the Mew-child?_


	14. Interlude: We Die Alone

In a different time, in a different place, there was a child, though this child was old enough to bear resentment at being called that instead of a teenager.

This was not unusual. Children generally grew into teenagers, there being very few ways of skipping the process, and this particular child valued specificity to a degree far above her peers.

Years ago, she had been given the nickname Moon for her habit of taking long, meandering walks through the town during the night. It had stuck, and soon very few people even remembered what she had been called before.

This, too, was not unusual. Many people had nicknames, from simple shortenings of birth names to exaggerations of physical features to names that they simply liked better. Moon was fond of hers; seeing the moon, bright, shining, mystical, swimming through the night sky, was one of the best parts of her walks, especially when the moon was full.

Moon had a Pokemon partner – a Ditto that she named Pete. The two of them had been at each other's sides for a handful of years, ever since Moon had found the Ditto shivering under a pile of snow.

This was, in fact, unusual, but only because Moon had never formally caught Pete. She'd tried, once, but the Pokeball turned out to be busted; after that, she simply never bothered to try again. She and Pete were the only ones who knew that Pete was technically a free agent anyway; all anyone else knew was that they were inseparable.

One evening, Moon was abducted.

It happened during one of her winding trips that led her down the remnants of the old road. She was sitting on the edge of the viaduct, looking out over the river, lost in the rippling reflection of the moon and the stars. A breeze, one with some bite to it, blew past her, and she drew her coat in around her; Pete was inside, snoring quietly, huddled up against her.

Moon smiled.

It was a peaceful winter day, and her life had been anything but peaceful lately.

That was when a hand, holding a faintly-chemical-scented rag, clapped itself over her mouth from behind her.

The fumes filled Moon's nose, her mouth, and the world swum around her, descending into heaving darkness.

The last sensation she felt before she dropped into unconsciousness was the gentle rise and fall of Pete's breathing against her chest.

* * *

The time that passed between Moon falling under and waking up again seemed to her to be at once an eternity and an instant, darkness that clung to her, surrounded her, and yet disappeared as quickly as it had appeared. When she opened her eyes, awareness didn't set in immediately; she only knew that she was cold, and that the chair she was in was uncomfortably hard. The latter problem was easily solved by standing up, and it was then, when she drew her arm to her chest to keep Pete from falling out of habit, that she realized why the former problem was a problem at all. Her coat was missing, leaving her in only the jeans and t-shirt that she'd been wearing under it.

That was when it hit her.

Pete was gone.

The thought focused Moon's mind more than anything else had. She was in a small room – no bigger than her bedroom at home, but with none of the comfort. The floor and walls were concrete, covered in faded, peeling paint that had once been white but now was barely even a color. A shattered window, barely big enough for her head to get through, sat in the wall behind her, letting air in that was growing colder by the minute; it was the only point of entry into the room other than two sturdy metal doors that were both, upon examination, locked. One of the doors had on it, at around eye level, a plaque that read 'Furnace Room – Risk of Third-Degree Burns. Absolutely No Entry by Unauthorized Individuals', but when Moon laid her hand against the metal, she could tell that the furnace wasn't running – it was as cold as everything else. The rest of the room was barren.

Moon stared out the window. Snow began to drift down from the sky, all large lazy flakes, and she wrapped her arms around herself and shivered. "Hello?" she called. "Pete? Where are you?"

No answer came.

At least, not an answer Moon wanted.

Footprints echoed outside the door, the one that didn't lead to the furnace, then the lock clicked and the door swung slowly inwards on hinges sorely in need of oil. The man who limped inside had a face Moon recognized in vague, dusty corners of her mind; it was sharp and angular and lean, just like the rest of him. He wore a slate-gray suit that had, at one point, been finely tailored, but time had eroded it into something threadbare and natty. Wrinkles were just beginning to set in around his forehead and the corners of his mouth, and his thin silver hair was swept back from his temples.

"Kid," the man said in a voice both sharp and gravelly, and in that one word, Moon immediately remembered him: the man she'd seen the night she found Pete, the one looking for a small pink Pokemon. Moon had lied to him then, and her heart skipped a beat as she ran down the reasons why he might have seen fit to trap her in this cold room. Had he been waiting for her all this time? Was this her punishment for lying? Her hands twitched unconsciously to the straps of her backpack, the ones she fidgeted with when she was nervous, but her backpack wasn't there either. She swallowed.

"I brought you here to talk," he continued, either unaware of or ignoring the journey Moon was sure her face was going on. "There are some things you've got in that head of yours that I want to know. Let me in on them, and you'll go home. Easy, right?" He closed the door behind him and let a hefty rusted toolbox drop to the floor.

All she had to do was tell him what she knew? Moon took a hesitant step backwards. "Um, Snover grow berries on their bellies in the spring. Mantyke look different in other countries. Finneon can glow in the dark. Skorupi—"

The man put a hand up. "Stop. Look. Kid… No, what's that nickname everyone calls you? Moon? Moon, I need to actually ask you the question first—"

"What's your name?"

"Huh?"

"What's your name?" Moon repeated. "You know mine. I should know yours."

The man sighed and ran a sinewy hand through his hair. "You can call me… One, I guess. That's as good as anything." He watched her with cold eyes, doubtless waiting for her to comment on it, but Moon had never been one to think any other name was odd. "So have you—"

"If you just wanted to talk, why did you lock me in here?" In the years since she could have been called a child and not gotten irritated about it, Moon's insistence on answering exactly the questions she was asked had morphed into a general feeling that everyone else should do the same, and she made a point of asking direct questions whenever she could. Questions were familiar ground for Moon. If she was asking questions, she didn't need to be scared.

One let out a low rumble from deep in his throat. "Kid. Moon. Shut _up_. I don't want to—"

"How am I supposed to answer the question you want me to answer if I shut up?"

" _Okay_. Okay." One took a deep breath, then let it hiss out through his teeth. He knelt and rummaged through the toolbox, coming back up with a length of iron chain that he wound experimentally around one hand before loosing it and approaching her. "We're going to play things a little differently then."

* * *

The chain bound Moon's hands behind her back, behind the chair. A second chain bound her feet. Sharp pain radiated out of bruises all over her body. Blood dribbled from her lips, from her nose, and it blended with her tears as they dripped off of her chin.

"I… I don't know…" she said, forcing the words out through shallow breaths.

It was the truth.

But One didn't believe it. He'd already shed his jacket, revealing a stained, rumpled shirt that he rolled the sleeves up on. After he'd forced her into the chair and tied her down, he'd started kicking.

"No. Try again. Where is Mew? What do you know?"

"I don't, I don't know anything about— about—"

One swung his leg in a wide arc, his hands in his pockets. The tip of his scuffed shoe drove into her side, and Moon let out a sob.

"Pl-please!" she coughed. "Please! Why don't you believe me? I'm, I'm telling the truth!"

"You are not." One took a step closer and leaned in, his face close enough to Moon's that she could feel his breath. "I know your game, Moon. You know what the technical term is? 'Lying by omission.' All the intel we gathered on you said the same thing. 'Watch out for Moon. She's slippery. Never gives you a straight answer.' And I _know_ you're not giving me a straight answer now. Go on, ask me how." He slammed his heel into her stomach. "Ask. Me. How."

Moon's cry pierced the frigid air. It had only grown colder outside, and snow was falling, drifting in through the broken window, scattered every which way by the wind. "H…" she started, but no further sounds would come out of her mouth.

That was evidently good enough for One. "We _saw_ Mew. Early mornings in town. More than once. And every time, it was flying around _your_ home." He grabbed her chin and yanked her face forward. "Your. Home. What do you suppose the odds of you knowing _nothing_ about Mew are, given that it seems to have such an interest in you?"

"I d… don't…"

"Wrong!" One shoved Moon's chin up sharply, snapping her head backwards. "Useless. Useless! I'm going to get this out of you, kid. No matter how long it takes. You think you can outlast me?" He bared his teeth, not waiting for an answer. "I'm going to let you sit here for a while. Looks like the weather's taking a turn for the worse. Stay warm."

One untied her.

Then One left.

* * *

Moon had no idea how long it had been. Her stomach and her throat gnawed at her, from equal parts hunger, thirst, and pain. Snow had only continued piling up, billowing inside, coating a full half of the room. It had even reached the door that led to the boiler room and covered the plaque on it, all except for two words. She'd curled up in one corner and tried to will warmth back into her body, but it wasn't working.

She shivered.

More precisely, she hadn't stopped shivering.

It felt like the chill was eating into her from every direction – from the wind, from the floor, from the walls, even from inside her. The room spun around her, pressing heavily against her mind, daring her to shut her eyes, but Moon couldn't even stand up.

"Need…" she breathed. "Need… help. 'M gonna fall 'sleep. Can't sleep."

Nobody heard her.

Moon raised one arm, weighed down with lead. It barely rose past her shoulder. With every heartbeat, slower and slower each time, a dull echo of pain reverberated through her head. "Where 'm I?" she muttered. "Don't… 'member."

Something slid in through the window, down the slope of frozen snow. Moon blinked at it with bleary eyes.

"Pete?"

It looked like a Ditto, at least as far as Moon could tell. Small, pink. Lacking a shape.

"Pete, 's me… You… you came to…"

The door swung open.

One.

"There you are, you little rat," he hissed.

Moon lifted her head dizzily. "S'not a rat… s'Pete."

Nobody took any notice of her. Pete inched forward, bearing an unusually determined expression. Then…

Pete changed.

Moon had seen Pete change before. Most Ditto could. But this time was different. It was less that Pete was temporarily borrowing a different form, and more that Pete was changing _back_.

A small, pink Pokemon. Not any bigger than a Ditto. A feline head with wide, piercing eyes. A long, slender tail.

Mew.

It looked at Moon, its head cocked, its face enigmatic. Then it turned its attention to One briefly before flying past him out the door.

One gave chase, holding a single Pokeball in one hand. Moon had never seen one like it before. The bottom half was the usual white, while the top half was purple with two pink circles.

The world fell quiet. Then, a triumphant shout from One, a high-pitched screech, a noise like a Pokeball opening, and a bright flash of almost pure-white light that hurt to look at, deep inside her brain.

"Help…" mumbled Moon, moments before her eyes shut and she slipped into sleep.

* * *

The person who found the missing teenager wasn't sure what made them look in the abandoned building with the broken windows, the one half-hidden by the snow that was so common this time of year in northern Sinnoh. It was like there was a little voice in the back of their head that told them where to go. They dug through the snow, looked through one of the windows, and could just barely see, in the corner, a slip of a girl, underdressed for the weather, huddled in the corner, not moving. The rest of the building was abandoned – not a soul to be found. The only signs that anyone had been there recently were debris strewn about the hallway outside the girl's room, and even then, the person thought, that could have easily been the wind.

They retrieved the girl and delivered her to the hospital.

The girl stayed asleep longer than anyone thought she would. Hours passed, then days, then weeks. Slowly, her strength returned to her, but her body refused to wake up. Experts examined her and said that there was something psychological about it all, but that was of scant comfort to anyone, let alone the girl.

It was years before her eyes opened.

She didn't know where she was, and she couldn't remember what had led up to her being there.

She remembered the cold. She remembered a man's hand on her chin, and iron chains around her wrists. She remembered Pete, and she remembered a small, pink, feline Pokemon staring at her.

Most of all, though, she remembered the sign on one of the doors.

'Furnace Room – Risk of Third-Degree Burns. Absolutely No Entry by Unauthorized Individuals'.

The snow had covered most of it up. There were only two words left that she could remember seeing.

'Degree.' 'Absolute.'


	15. Hopeless

Visions danced through Mel's head, ethereal and ephemeral. As soon as she got a glimpse of one, it vanished, only to be replaced by something equally incomprehensible.

A purple coat, discarded on the ground.

A terrible machine, wreathed in thick cables.

Red gemstones, floating in the darkness.

The number '1', written in blood.

A familiar figure, clad in ragged clothing and bearing a wide, impish smile.

A small pinkish-purple blob.

Pink fur cascading across a curious, cat-like face.

Mel's eyes shot open. "Just once," she muttered as her senses returned to her, "I'd like to have a dream where I understood more than half of it."

Or rather, that was what she would have said, but before she got past the first word, Mel realized that there was a cloth tied around her head, through her mouth – a gag. She let out a muffled yelp, equal parts surprise and anger, and tried to stand, only to find that her arms and legs were likewise bound behind her back, forcing her to stay seated in the chair she found herself in.

 _Okay, Mel, think. Think. What's going on? Where am I?_ Mel's eyes darted across her surroundings. Dim, flickering fluorescent lights hummed above her, the only noise breaking the silence. The room was small enough to be a closet, albeit one that was walk-in, and the walls, floor, and ceiling were all a uniform slate gray. A table, gray, sat in the corner a few feet away from the chair, also gray, that Mel was tied to. A single gray door with a frosted window led out, and on the same wall, some feet above the door, was an air vent, which was, curiously, white.

 _With interior design like this, I can't imagine who this room belongs to_ , Mel thought, rolling her eyes. _Time to focus. What do I remember? I was at Birth Island. I talked to the Mew-child. But then No.2 stole the things from me and knocked me out. And she had those legendary Pokemon_ , she realized with a chill down her spine. _Two of them. That's bad news._

 _Wait, hold on. Where's Repeat?_

"I see the… subject… is awake," came a voice from somewhere in the ceiling. Mel jumped – she hadn't seen a speaker or anything where it could have been emanating from. It sounded like No.2 filtered through a few layers of static, but Mel could still hear the disgust dripping from the words.

"What's going on?" Mel tried to ask. What actually came out was, "Mmph mmn mn?"

"I expect the subject wishes to know more about her circumstances," No.2 continued. "Ordinarily, the subject would be advised that no such information would be forthcoming. However, in this circumstance, there appears to be no harm evident in enlightening her."

"Mmn mm mph mmmph," said Mel, which meant "get to the point."

"Number nine."

Mel frowned. _Number nine? What does that—wait, she doesn't mean—!_

"I see the subject understands. Yes. The subject will become Neo Rocket No.9. Now that the subject has been properly restrained, our tools for the erasure of memories and emotions will be present shortly. The subject is advised to enjoy her last moments as herself. Inasmuch as she can, anyway."

The loudspeaker cut off with a squeal.

A weight settled in Mel's stomach. _No. No. I can't let that happen. There's too much at stake. I have to find Repeat. I have to save Janine and Bill and the Mew-child. I have to get out of here. If they get in my head, it's all over. The only other people who know what's going on are Hyacinth, Izzy, and that professor._ Mel swallowed. She could feel her heartbeat speeding up, and the world was beginning to spin around her. She squeezed her eyes shut. _Okay, okay, calm. I need to be calm. Can't afford to panic. If I think it through, maybe I can figure out how to get out of this. I'm tied up. How do I get NOT tied up? These ropes are tight. I can barely move at all. Can't call for help. Nobody would be able to hear me, and besides, I'm sure everyone around here is a Neo Rocket anyway. Can't just wait for someone to waltz in and save me; that's not going to happen._

Despite her best efforts, Mel could feel the fear rising up her throat. _What do I do? What do I do? What do I_ do _?! I—I—!_

The fear subsided.

Mel's heart slowed.

Her eyes opened.

She spread her arms experimentally, and the ropes fell to the ground.

The bindings around her legs and her mouth followed shortly.

Mel stood.

 _Were those… not as tight as I thought?_ Mel asked herself, staring at her hands. _Was I panicking over nothing?_

A muffled voice, speaking indistinctly, drifted in from outside the door – a Neo Rocket. _Right_ , Mel thought. _Thinking later. Escaping now._ She dragged the chair to the wall, underneath the air vent, and clambered up on top of it. Balancing on her tiptoes, Mel could just reach the vent, and she pried the grill loose, letting it fall to the floor with a clatter. Right as the doorknob began to turn, Mel grabbed the lip of the vent and hoisted herself up, mentally giving thanks to a workout routine that was heavy on the pull-ups. The duct was only barely big enough for her to scramble inside and draw herself forward, disappearing into it just as someone entered the room behind her. The last thing she heard before the banging of her hands on sheet metal drowned everything else out was the Neo Rocket's voice – "She's escaped into the ductwork."

When it came to dangerous situations, the average reader would have been hard-pressed to name one that Septimus Reus, he of the _Collected Journals_ , had not thrown himself headlong into in the name of tracking legendary Pokemon. As a matter of fact, one of the sections of his final journal was 'Dangerous Situations I Have Not Been In,' and it was an otherwise-blank page. In his essay describing his search for the rumored Genesect, Reus went into detail about the abandoned Plasma facility he infiltrated by climbing in through the air ducts.

"When you see people crawling through air ducts in the movies," Reus wrote, "you don't get the whole story as to why it's actually a bad idea. Have you ever laid hands on sheet metal? It's noisy stuff. Plus, it's usually got jagged edges, which essentially make ductwork noisy, painful tunnels. Don't even get me started on how small the ductwork tends to be – and you'd best pray that you don't come across a 90-degree bend in the duct, because those are a bear to get around when you can barely move.

"All in all," Reus continued, "I give air ducts one of my lowest safety ratings of all: a scant 0.5 Koffing out of 5. It's really not worth it. If you can, just find a door and save yourself some heartache." By way of comparison, Reus gave 'touching a Magcargo barehanded' a rating of '1 Koffing' and 'exploring Mount Moon without any Repels' a rating of '0 Koffing', also known as the vaunted 'Skull and Crossbones.' When a colleague asked Reus why zero Koffing was the 'Skull and Crossbones,' since no Koffing at all would actually be safer than, say, five Koffing in one's immediate vicinity, Reus wrote them back an angry letter, the contents of which were never published but were assumed to be sufficiently scathing.

The air vent Mel had climbed into hit Reus' trifecta: a loud clang echoed all around her every time she so much as moved her hand, she could barely raise herself up past her hands and knees, and she'd already opened three different cuts on her hands and arms from the sharp metal.

It was, as Reus would have put it, a very '0.5 Koffing' sort of day.

Only the sparse light peeking in through other vents gave Mel anything to navigate by. She crawled to the one nearest to her and looked out through it. The vent hung above an empty room, outfitted much like the one she'd escaped from; the only difference was that instead of a table and a chair, it had a locker and a cot with neatly-folded sheets.

 _Bedroom_ , thought Mel. _Nothing here. Keep going._

Before she could pull herself past the grate, though, the loudspeaker in the room squeaked into life. "Subject Mel," said the droning voice of No.2. "I am aware you are listening. You should not be fooled into believing that you have given us the slip. You can only go so far. Exit the ventilation system now, and we will proceed with your induction."

 _And why is that a good option?_

"It is the same thing that would have happened anyway," No.2 said, as if reading Mel's mind, "but as it is a foregone conclusion, it will save you some trouble."

Mel rolled her eyes and began crawling past the bedroom. The next room past it was also a bedroom, but as she looked into it through the grate, the door leading in opened and one of the grunts entered. They had purple hair, but Mel could tell that they weren't Janine – and that was confirmed for her when the grunt took their mask off after grabbing a bottle of water from the locker. They looked fairly androgynous, and their hair was thicker and more unruly than Janine's. Mel recognized the face, but not enough to put a name to it – she vaguely recalled seeing it in some TV show about the gym leaders of Johto. The grunt put their mask back on after taking a drink of water and tossed a Pokeball to the ground, releasing the Scyther Mel had last seen on Birth Island; the two of them left the room.

 _So they have more than one gym leader…_ Mel thought. _I wonder why that hasn't been bigger news… is it because that was a Johto leader? What's their obsession with collecting leaders anyway?_

"Subject Mel," came No.2's voice, again through the loudspeaker. "Make no mistake. We will find you. There is something to be said for giving up the fight when a loss is inevitable. Why continue to struggle? You have no hope left. To continue on in the face of certainty is foolish. Idiotic. Do you understand this, Subject Mel? You are undertaking idiotic actions. You are idiotic."

 _Must be getting on her nerves._ Mel couldn't sense No.2, but her words were evident enough. The third bedroom she arrived at was identical to the others, and in this one, a grunt was already in there – they too were putting their mask on, but not before Mel could catch a glimpse of their face. Unlike the last one, Mel recognized this grunt immediately.

It was Blue, the ex-gym leader of Viridian. His orange-brown hair, his piercing eyes, his striking resemblance to his grandfather – they were all unmistakable. Mel couldn't stop a quiet gasp from leaving her mouth. She knew that Blue was no longer a gym leader – he had, some years back, voluntarily ceded the position to another Pallet trainer named Green so that he and the champion Red could travel the world. The last Mel had heard, Blue and Red had popped up in Alola, but that had been ages ago and she didn't know what had become of them after that.

 _What if they have Red too? Blue is bad enough, but…_ The thought was sobering. Red had been known as the best in the world in his day, and even after he'd secluded himself at the peak of Mount Silver, trainers were chomping at the bit to test their mettle against him. Blue was a nightmare to battle, Mel knew that much from word of mouth, but Red had beaten him every time they went head-to-head. _Neo Rocket with both Red and Blue,_ Mel thought, _might be nearly invincible_.

"Subject Mel," No.2 said from the loudspeaker. "I trust you are finding your unauthorized excursion through our base illuminating. Here is something I hope you find equally illuminating. Do you know what I feel towards you, inasmuch as I feel anything?"

Silence followed. _Is she expecting me to answer?_ Mel thought. _Has she lost it?_

"Hate." That one word had more venom dripping from it than anything else Mel had heard out of No.2's mouth. "Hate, hate, hate. I loathe you, Subject Mel. I harbor unbridled hatred towards you. If you were to replace every letter in _A Relentlessly Thorough History of the Pewter Museum of Science_ with the word 'hate', it would scarcely approach one-tenth of the bile that I reserve for you, personally."

 _What did I even do to you, lady?_

"We have defeated you. Multiple times. We defeated you in Fuchsia City. We defeated you on Birth Island. The only reason we did not defeat you in the Tanoby Ruins is because of your violent associate. And yet, you refuse to accept the inevitable. We will defeat you once more, now that you are isolated from your colleagues and your Pokemon. You must know this. It is within our power to kill you, Subject Mel. It would be a simple task. An Absol's blade can cut a human's neck as easily as a Pokemon's. The sole reason why you are still alive is that we require you to unseal the Mew-child. Once it is free, with the gym leaders under our command, the Mew-child will easily be captured and will likewise fall into line. We will have unparalleled power, Subject Mel. And the only obstacle that stands in our way is you."

 _The gym leaders under their command…_ Mel thought. _That's right! If Neo Rocket has a collection of some of the most powerful trainers in the world, controlling any Pokemon they caught would be a snap! That must be how they're getting Uxie and Mesprit to obey them! If they're smart about it, they could walk away with any legendary they can find!_

"So why do you persist, Subject Mel? Why do you not give in? You have no hope. There is nothing you can do. Your struggle is futile. Worthless." No.2's voice steadily grew louder and louder until she was nearly shouting. "Why? Why? Why, why, why, why—"

The loudspeaker cut off.

Mel couldn't move for a moment. She was pretty certain she'd just heard, broadcast to the entire base, the sound of someone finally losing their tenuous grip on reality. She shuddered, tried semi-successfully to shake it off, and kept moving.

The next grill overlooked, not another bedroom, but some kind of jerry-rigged Pokemon Center. A healing machine that had almost certainly been stolen lay to one side, cables and wires connecting it to a power source through haphazard holes in the wall. A ramshackle metal shelving unit sat next to it, barely supporting stacks upon stacks of Potions of every flavor, Full Heals, Revives, and a rainbow of other items.

There was only a single Pokemon in the room, resting on one of the shelves and staring at the closed door.

Mel's eyes widened. "Repeat!" she said aloud before remembering where she was and clapping a hand over her mouth. When Repeat failed to hear her, instead continuing to stare at the door, Mel reached out and grabbed the grate, tentatively shaking it. _He must be terrified. Can't do anything but just watch the door, waiting for someone to come for him. Hold on, Repeat,_ she thought, _I'm coming. I'm gonna save you._

The grate refused to give more than a fraction of an inch; unlike the one in the room Mel had been interred in, this one was tightly screwed to its frame. Mel shoved against it a few more times, then exhaled. _Shoot. No dice. What are my options here? I could try and climb down somewhere else, but then I'd have to find my way back to this room – and I'm sure they've gotta be on high alert for me. That's not gonna work. What else? I could leave, track down Hyacinth and Izzy, and come back guns blazing… except I don't even know where I am. That's no good either. Think, Mel. Think. Think!_ With her eyes screwed shut, Mel slammed her hand against the grill one more time…

….and it fell out, screws scattering across the floor.

Mel blinked, then hissed as the stabbing pain in her fist finally made it to her brain. She grabbed the lip of the vent and pulled herself out, trying to ignore how sharp the metal was; with an inelegant tumble, she was on the ground.

Repeat still didn't shift his gaze from the door. "Repeat?" Mel asked, wiping away some of the blood from her palms off on her pants. "Repeat? You okay?"

There was no response.

"Hey, come on, man. It took me longer than I wanted, but I still came for you. You don't have to give me the silent treatment." Mel approached him, her hands shaking, and gently rubbed him on his back. "Say something, buddy…"

Repeat turned to her. "Oh, sorry, you were talking to me?"

"Of course I was, dummy!" said Mel, a smile spreading across her face as relief coursed through her veins. "Who else would I be talking to? Now let's get outta here, huh?"

"Um." Repeat cast an askew glance at her. "Who are you, exactly?"

Mel paled. "…What?"

As Repeat's words sunk in, the door to the room swung open, slamming hard into the wall. No.2 strode in, her pale skin and blood-red hair letting Mel identify her easily even though she was still dressed identically to every other Neo Rocket. "Subject Mel," No.2 said, her words dropping out of her mouth like tombstones. "You behaved exactly as I expected you to."

"You expected…?"

"Naturally." The vibes around No.2 pulsated like a heartbeat, radiating anger, hate, and disgust. Mel could feel it rolling through her head, coating her mind in No.2's sludge. "Given that you had escaped, it was only logical to assume that you would attempt to rescue your miserable excuse for a Pokemon. So I waited for you. And now, Subject Mel, we will undergo a journey together." 

"What're you talking about?" Mel growled. "Undo whatever you did to Repeat before I cave your head in!"

No.2 waved a finger in Mel's face at an angle seemingly precisely chosen to maximize irritation. "No, Subject Mel. We will, together, explore the reasons why you continue to struggle in the face of inevitability."

"And how're you gonna do that?"

"That is easy enough, Subject Mel." No.2 snapped her fingers, and one of the guardians of Sinnoh – Uxie – appeared behind her. "We are going to examine your memories. And then we will erase them."

Uxie opened its eyes.

Mel couldn't stop herself from looking.


	16. My Name is Mel

In a different time, in a different place, there was a child.

This was unusual, not because of the existence of the child in general – as was previously established, children were fairly common – but because of where the child was. She lived in a Pokemon shelter, the only other human inhabits of which was a newlywed couple that, to put it delicately, had not been expecting children when she came along.

The child was standoffish, but not quiet, tending toward violent outbursts as often as hiding and hoping nobody could see her.

This, too, was unusual, as that particular combination of traits made her a rarity among her peers. That was not the only reason she stood out, but it certainly didn't help.

Though she lived in a house full of injured and recovering Pokemon, the child had none of her own.

This was not, in fact, unusual. The child had not yet turned 10 years old, though she would very soon. As one of the minimum requirements for a trainer's license was being at least 10, she wasn't allowed to handle Pokemon on a professional level, though most people turned a blind eye to the friendly, unofficial battles that the younger children got up to.

The child's name was Mel, and on the morning of her 10th birthday, she woke up from a dream that had her tossing and turning. With her pillowcase dampened by sweat, Mel sat up, rubbing at her eyes, trying to recall the details. Though they were rapidly disappearing from her head, Mel could remember a few things: a Ditto, a Mew, someone in a gray uniform, a woman wearing a purple coat…

Then it was gone. It didn't bother Mel; she always had weird dreams on nights after her mom told her stories about the Mew-child.

A Doduo crowed in stereo from the yard behind the shelter. His name was Blitz, and he'd been with the shelter for as long as Mel could remember. Mel had long since learned to dread his daily morning alarm, because as soon as he was awake, almost everyone else in the shelter would be waking up too.

Then Mel felt it: a dull pressure that surrounded her mind like an ocean, ebbing and flowing but inexorably making its way further and further inwards. It carried with it a familiar ache, composed of the pain and happiness and anger and sadness of everyone nearby. Not all of it was bad, but there was just so _much_ …

Mel screwed her eyes shut and tried to force it all down. Her psychic powers weren't new, and they had always been, well, a headache, since she couldn't turn them off. Her parents had no psychic powers of their own, and all they'd been able to do for her had been to get advice from some of the practitioners in Saffron. With their help, Mel was learning to dampen the effects somewhat, but it was a slow process. In the meantime, though, there was at least the aspirin that her parents let her keep next to her bed. Mel swallowed one of the pills, hoping it would take the edge off soon, and rose.

Making her way to the kitchen for breakfast required Mel to avoid a group of three Pichu that were making a spirited attempt at gnawing through a power cable; in the kitchen itself was a Gulpin, the only one of its kind Mel had ever seen, trying to pry open the refrigerator. As Mel sat with a bowl of cereal, a Natu hopped from one side of the table to the other, its wide, unblinking eyes fixated on hers. A Growlithe and a Meowth tumbled past, tussling with each other, nearly colliding with her legs.

All in all, it was a typical morning – the kind that made Mel thankful she was about to leave the house to go to school.

'School', in this case, referred to Fuchsia Elementary, within walking distance of the Rylan Family Pokemon Shelter. The wind bit at Mel through her jacket; her parents hadn't yet had the opportunity to get her a new one after a Slugma slept on it. Mel didn't mind, though – the air was fresh and cool, a nice change of pace from her house's stuffy atmosphere, which had impressed upon her the indelible odor of countless Pokemon.

As Mel walked, other students hurried past her, none of them pausing to give her even the slightest glance; to nearly everyone else in her grade, Mel was "that weird girl in ratty clothes." It didn't help that Mel had hit her growth spurt early and had been a head taller than everyone else for over a year. It was almost paradoxical: her size, her clothes, the smell of Pokemon on her, all made Mel stand out, and all she got for it was to be ignored almost wholly.

Almost.

A spike of malice pierced the fog of emotions that washed through her mind. Mel lifted her head. She was nearly at the school gates, and waiting for her there were…

They were in her grade; she never cared enough to remember their names, but she knew who they were. There were three of them, all boys; they looked to be roughly the same size, but to Mel, everyone at school was shorter than she was anyway. Two of them were twins, with identical scraggly haircuts and pristine uniforms; the third, the leader, was stocky and had a buzzcut so close to his head that he was nearly bald. His otherwise flawless face was marred by a misaligned nose, from the one fight he'd been in where anyone had managed to land a punch on him.

Without their names, Mel had mentally nicknamed them Twin 1 and Twin 2 (though which one was which varied based on the day) and Cueball.

"Do you smell something?" Twin 1 asked in a sing-song lilt.

"Meowth musk, isn't it?" said Twin 2 with a gap-toothed sneer.

"Naw, I think it's Spearow poop."

"You're crazy. It's gotta be the Meowth."

"Spearow!"

"Meowth!"

"Hey, hey," Cueball said, holding up his hands. "Shut up. That's not very nice of you, is it? All it is is Melanie. That's all. She can't help that she stinks, right?"

"Or that her clothes are nasty," Twin 2 said.

"Right," Cueball continued with a leery grin. "So let's leave her alone, huh?"

Mel rolled her eyes. She knew better than to take Cueball's words at face value.

"So how's it going today, Melanie?" Cueball asked.

"I don't wanna talk to you." Mel held tight to the straps of her backpack and began to walk past them. "I'm going to class."

The twins stood in her way, blocking the gate. "Leaving so quick?" Twin 1 asked.

"We're just trying to be friendly," added Twin 2.

Mel shoved through them, and her size gave it some added oomph. "I don't care what you're trying to do," she said. "Stay outta my way."

"Well, isn't that a shame." Cueball punctuated his sentence by cracking his knuckles. "Here we are, all nice and everything, and this is how you treat us. I guess we gotta teach you some manners."

"Of course you do." Mel rolled her eyes and let a breath stream out through her teeth. It always went the same with them. No matter what she said, they'd find some excuse to start trading blows. And so Mel fell back on the only thing that worked.

She ran.

Cueball and the twins hadn't always paid that much attention to her. For a while, they'd ignored her entirely in favor of smaller targets. But as more and more people in their year turned 10, got their license, and left school to go on their own gym challenges, the number of potential victims dwindled. Their class was barely half as big as it had been at the beginning of the year, and the threat of Cueball turning his gaze on her was almost incentive enough for Mel to want a license of her own, in spite of her general dislike of being around Pokemon.

Running at full speed, Mel easily outpaced Cueball and the twins, who were reduced to bracing themselves against their knees and panting before they'd even made it two blocks. Mel didn't stop. It wasn't the first time she'd missed a day of school; sometimes the thought of sitting in a class with them, with everyone, all of their emotions pressing down on her, and then going home to a crowd of Pokemon with no rest in between… it exhausted her. And she had a place she liked to go.

Route 15, east of town, was a popular hangout for all kinds of trainers. Bird keepers liked the wide open area for letting their flying Pokemon stretch their wings; bikers enjoyed the long stretches of unobstructed land for building up speed. Beginning trainers, often accompanied by their teachers, often congregated closer to the gatehouse. On top of that, some of the Pokemon found there couldn't be found anywhere else – and there were rumors that, on clear days, Articuno could be seen flying far overhead.

Mel intended to avoid all of them. By hopping the fence that lined the footpath, she could disappear into the trees, where no trainers ventured. She nestled herself in the crook of a sturdy branch and sighed as the oppressive weight surrounding her mind receded. She could still sense a few other presences here and there, but they were just Pokemon passing by, not bothering her.

A squeak rose from the base of the tree. Mel looked down. A small, pinkish-purple Pokemon with no definite shape stared back at her. It wasn't a type of Pokemon she'd seen before, and all she was getting from its mind was curiosity. "Keep moving," she growled, and either the Pokemon didn't understand or it just didn't care. Mel looked back up to the canopy and crossed her arms. _Not any business of mine whatever it does._

Just as Mel was beginning to doze off, she felt a sudden pressure on her belly. Her eyes shot open. The blobby Pokemon had scaled the tree and landed on top of her. It kept its blank stare fixed on her, but before Mel could even lift a hand to shoo it away, it began to… change.

Mel frowned. She'd seen a lot of the Pokemon that lived in the area before, as well as the stranger ones that passed through the shelter. She was somewhat familiar with what they could do, and she knew that they evolved into other Pokemon when they got stronger, but this one was doing something different than evolution. Its entire body was twisting and turning in on itself, and in the blink of an eye, it had turned completely into… a smaller Mel, the same size the creature had started as, resting on top of her. It stuck out its tongue.

"That is…" Mel started before faltering. She wasn't quite sure what she had expected it to do, but that hadn't been it. Her mind shuffled through several different ways to finish her sentence – "weird," "scary," "eerie" – before she landed on "pretty cool."

The creature let out a happy squeak.

The hours passed quickly, and as the sun began to set, Mel dropped from the tree and wandered home, and the bubblegum-colored creature followed at her heels every step of the way.

* * *

"Subject Mel. Do you mean to tell me that the only reason you have your Ditto in the first place is because it made a funny face at you? How… embarrassingly like you. Fitting that these memories should fade just as easily."

* * *

There was a stab of pain, and the world around her faded to white.

Unlike nearly every other person in her year, Mel did not get her trainer's license the day she turned 10. It took her parents several months to convince her that, in order to train her newfound Ditto in any official capacity, she had to be licensed. By the time she passed the trainer's exam, most of her classmates who had gone on gym challenges had come back, having given up after running into particularly tough gyms two or three badges in. As it ended up, Mel was the only one among her peers to get a trainer's license and not even attempt a gym challenge – she was happy enough just hanging out with her Ditto, who she named Repeat because "that's a good name for something that copies things, right?".

At least, that was the case for roughly five years.

Mel's family attended the Venomoth Festival, a celebration of one of the most iconic Pokemon native to Fuchsia, every year, and the highlight was always the tournament that closed the ceremonies; the victor won the right to challenge Koga directly without having to navigate his gym.

That had been the case for as long as Mel could remember, so it caught her by surprise when, at her fifteenth Venomoth Festival, they announced a change. "No tournament this year," the announcers had said. "Koga's being promoted up to the Elite Four."

There had been rumors, of course, that Koga was destined for bigger and better things. The Elite Four was in a state of upheaval: Lorelei returned to her home in the Sevii Islands, Agatha retired, and the champion disappeared into the depths of Mount Silver. The only members left were Bruno and Lance. Word was that they'd already lined up a few accomplished trainers to pad their roster back out, and that one of them was a certain poison-type gym leader.

Taking Koga's place as gym leader was his daughter, Janine, though she hadn't officially stepped into the role yet. The Venomoth Festival's announcers had said that, taking the place of the tournament, there would be a special ceremony dedicated to swearing her in. It took place at the same location as the tournament, Mel noticed, with the only difference being that they'd sprung for nicer planks of wood to form the makeshift stage. She sat to the side of the audience, avoiding the crowd, with Repeat on her shoulder.

"Ladies and gentlemen," one of the two announcers called, "please welcome to the stage… the new leader of the Fuchsia Gym! Janine!" The crowd erupted into applause as Janine stepped up.

Mel winced and closed her eyes at the sudden wave of excitement that washed over her, but it wasn't as bad as it had been in the past. She'd learned about tamping her powers down so that they didn't overwhelm her, and it almost felt to her like they'd gotten more manageable with age anyway. She let out a breath and opened her eyes, then felt her heart skip a beat. "Oh no," she whispered, "she's cute."

"What was that, boss?" Repeat asked. In the five years since they'd met, Mel had gotten all right at deciphering what he meant when he spoke, though sometimes it still proved difficult.

"Nothing," Mel said, clearing her throat. "Just thinking that I'd never actually seen her before. Heard her name lots though. Now shush, or else we'll miss the ceremony."

"Why are you so interested in—"

"I said shush!"

The ceremony passed without incident, with Koga himself taking the stage to swear Janine in and hand her the official gym badge, the one that all gym leaders kept on them as proof of their occupation. The last event of the festival, per tradition, was a closing speech by the gym leader, and Janine took the microphone with relish, though Mel could still feel nervous tension edging in.

"It's an honor to be standing here as your new gym leader, everyone," Janine said. "My dad has left some big shoes to fill, but I intend to be every bit the challenge he was. So, to prove myself…" She paused. "I'll battle one volunteer. Right now. And if they beat me, they get a Soul Badge. No questions asked, no need to challenge the gym." Another pause, then she smiled. "Any takers?"

Mel's hand was in the air before she even knew what she was doing.

"Boss?" Repeat hissed, his eyes wide. "What—why?!"

"Um…" said Mel. She wasn't sure herself. "Worth a shot?"

"There!" Janine said, pointing at Mel. "There's our challenger! Come on up!" Mel took the stage, brushing herself off, and Janine clapped a hand on her shoulder, making her heart jump. "And what's your name?"

"Melanie Rylan," Mel said, standing stock-straight.

Janine grinned. "Hey hey hey! Looks like our challenger comes to us from the Rylan Family Pokemon Shelter! Well then, Melanie Rylan, are you ready for a battle?"

"As I'll ever be." Letting Repeat crawl down into her arms, Mel retreated to the challenger's side of the stage. She tossed Repeat into the center. "Let's get it done, Repeat!"

"Oh, a Ditto! A Pokemon worthy of a ninja master!" said Janine, twirling a Pokeball on her fingertip. "In that case… Venomoth, time to shine!" Her Venomoth likewise appeared in the center of the arena, towering about Repeat.

"Repeat! Transform!" Mel called, and Repeat immediately began twisting and changing his shape—

"Bug Buzz!"

A shrieking whine tore across the stage, driving Mel to her knees as she clapped her ears to her head. She'd never heard anything like it, and on top of how much it made her want to drive nails into her eardrums on the ground that it could scarcely feel _worse_ , she also got a crashing wave of pain from the heads of everyone else in the audience. _And that wasn't even aimed at me_ , she thought, using the exercises she'd learned to try and dampen the pain in her head. _Imagine how much worse that would have been if I were the one getting attacked._ Mel shook her head to clear her thoughts, but when she rose to her feet, she saw that it didn't matter: Repeat had collapsed almost immediately.

"That's one down," Janine said. "You can send out your next Pokemon any time."

"I, uh… That's it. I just have Repeat."

Janine blinked. "Oh. Well… I guess that's that, then. Um, good match?"

As the crowd dispersed, Mel knelt at Repeat's side. "Hey, buddy," she whispered, "you okay?"

Repeat grunted something that Mel didn't know how to translate directly, but she figured meant something along the lines of "I'll survive." Mel picked him up. "Maybe next time," he groaned, "we train some before you try to take on a gym."

"Don't worry, Repeat," Mel said. "I don't think I have much of a taste for it."

* * *

"You tried to challenge a gym leader with only one Pokemon that you never trained? Subject Mel, you are significantly more foolhardy than I could have ever imagined. Oh well. Let us move on."

Another sharp pain, and the memory faded out.

* * *

Darkness. Darkness surrounded her. She could feel nothing, see nothing, hear nothing. Complete and total emptiness. She screamed out, but her voice wouldn't leave her throat. She couldn't move—

* * *

"Subject Mel, what memory could that have possibly been? You should thank me for getting rid of that one for you. We will pick up further on."

* * *

"Repeat," Mel murmured, "get the used Escape Rope out of my bag and come this way very quietly, okay?"

It had been three years since Mel first met Janine. In the time since, Mel had watched several of Janine's battles – not only had she trained herself to not fall over at the slightest hint of a Bug Buzz, she'd also realized something.

She could help Pokemon.

Mel still didn't like being cooped up at home. It was crowded, and the less said about how often she'd stepped in Zubat guano the better. But, after having Repeat with her for eight years, Mel knew that it wasn't the fault of the Pokemon. Watching Janine's battles had taught Mel what it felt like when Pokemon sparred with each other – and, more importantly, how different it felt from when Pokemon were genuinely injured or abused.

On the morning of her eighteenth birthday, Mel begged her parents to let her get out in the field. Her psychic powers, she argued, though they weren't as strong as they used to be, would let her track and locate hurt Pokemon that she could then bring back to the shelter.

Her parents, after checking that Mel hadn't been replaced with a Pokemon-loving evil duplicate of some kind, heartily agreed.

That was how Mel found herself climbing Mount Moon and, while on the trail of a Paras with only one working eye, had fallen into a Clefable nest. No fewer than three Clefable were staring at her, though none of them had yet to make a move. Repeat inched around the perimeter of the crater, holding a coil of rope. Silph Co. had managed to infuse simple man-made items with the properties of Pokemon attacks, leading to the development of the Escape Rope – a single use item that, when activated, used Teleport. Afterwards, it couldn't be used again, though it still served just fine as a piece of rope.

"Great," whispered Mel. "Now drop it to me."

"You got it, boss." Repeat dropped one end of the rope into the crater.

Mel grabbed it and tugged on it, testing whether it would hold her weight, then began inching her way up towards Repeat.

One of the Clefable raised its hand. Mel stopped in her tracks, not daring to take a breath. With a wag of its finger, the rope was neatly bisected, and Mel slid back down into the center of the nest.

"Boss!" Repeat yelled as he hurled himself down into the crater. "Don't worry, boss! I'll protect you!"

The resulting maelstrom of Moonblasts was visible all the way from Pewter City.

After what felt like an eternity, the Clefable threw Mel and Repeat, both battered and bruised, out of their nest. The rock that formed Mount Moon wasn't what Mel would have called comfortable, but it was better than getting the daylights beaten out of her.

"See, boss?" Repeat asked weakly, lying next to her. "I told you I'd protect you."

Despite it all, Mel couldn't stop herself from laughing.

* * *

"Subject Mel. What is this? Every memory I've seen of yours is one in which you lose, or you run away. You lose, or you run. Why, Subject Mel? Why do you continue, even in the face of so much… _failure_? Have you ever _succeeded_? Where are your victories? And if there are none, why do you continue to interfere? Why can you not learn this one simple lesson?!"

The pain, now familiar, returned, and the memory disappeared into light.

"Now, Subject Mel—huh? Who are you? What are you doing here?... Must I do everything myself?... Wha—no! Attack me if you must, but I forbid you from also attacking the subject, especially with a psychic attack! This is a very delicate procedure, and we cannot afford error!"

The light grew ever brighter, more than she had ever seen before, searing through her eyes directly into her head. The pain extended past her mind, coursing through her entire body, and she had the sensation of something… changing.

Mel opened her eyes. She saw… someone. And someone else. One of them wore a gray uniform with a red 'R' on it, and the other wore an off-white robe. She frowned. Something about that seemed important, but she couldn't remember what. Next to the second someone, there was a Pokemon, purple and star-shaped, with a gemstone in the center.

The one in the gray uniform ran out of the room, chasing the one in the robe and the star-shaped Pokemon. A second Pokemon, blue-gray and adorned with red jewels, followed them out. There was only one other Pokemon in the room, a small pinkish-purple blob, and it didn't seem to be watching her.

Then, footsteps. Another figure Mel didn't recognize dashed in. This one wore a trench coat that was too big for them and a pair of glasses that obscured the better part of their face. "Ah, there's Repeat," the intruder muttered. "But where's Mel?"

Mel almost volunteered her position, but she thought better of it. _No idea who this person is, after all,_ she thought.

"I can't waste time," they continued. "If Mel were here, I'd ask to borrow Repeat… argh, I'll have to borrow him anyway! When I find her, I'll tell her that this repays the favors I've done for her!" They picked up the last Pokemon in the room and disappeared.

Mel watched them go. _I wonder who that was. Were they looking for me? My name's Mel, but maybe they were looking for someone different._ She hopped down from her chair. Her memories were fragmented, and she could only recall so much about who she was, but she was reasonably certain that she used to be taller, and that getting out of a chair didn't involve jumping to the floor.

 _I feel so… weird_ , Mel thought. Her head felt empty, not just because she couldn't remember so much – some sense or something was gone, though she couldn't figure out what it had been. She looked at her hands.

She didn't have hands, per se – just purplish pseudopods. It wasn't right, she knew that much, but she could barely remember why, and when she looked herself over more fully, she realized that she looked just like the Pokemon that the intruder had taken with them.

The word 'Ditto' filled her mind.


	17. Child of Light

It had taken Mel more effort than she had expected to get out of the room. The doorknob was clearly geared for someone far taller than her, and the room, which up until that point had seemed so small and cramped, took ages to cross. All of the fixtures – the arcane machine, the shelving units, the ductwork across the ceiling – towered above her.

It was wrong. _Everything_ was wrong. When Mel closed her eyes, she could feel something inside her struggling to break out, to take control, but it just wasn't strong enough. Her body was reacting, though; her skin lit up with a tingle, and her limbs, if they could even be called that, twitched unconsciously.

The hallway outside the room was just as monochromatic: gray upon gray upon gray. Even the lights flickering overhead had a faintly gray tint to them. Mel peeked out from behind the door, leaving it open only a crack. Footfalls echoed down the corridor towards her, playing a duet with the admittedly-quieter sounds of wings flapping. One of the humans in the gray uniforms – not the one who'd been in the room with Mel – passed by without paying her a second glance. The human had mulberry-colored hair curling out from under her hat and a face that, though half-covered, still sparked memories in Mel's head. Someone else trailed behind, an insectoid Pokemon with blank, bulbous eyes and pale wings covered in what looked like dust.

She looked important, Mel decided. Something about her caught Mel's eye. Mel slipped out of the door and crept down the hall behind the pair. The human took a right at a fork, and—

"Hey! Can you hear me? You've got to listen!"

The voice spoke directly into her mind, bypassing her ears entirely. It was at once completely silent and earth-shatteringly loud, maddeningly familiar and wholly foreign. Mel clapped her pseudopods to the sides of her face, an instinct that made no sense and perfect sense to her at the same time. "Who— who are—"

"Hmm. You really have lost a bunch of memories – your head's real mixed up. That's no good." The voice clicked their tongue. "What to do, what to do… You're not going to be able to get me free like this. So I guess we need to figure out how to get your memories back before anything else."

"Easier said than done," Mel grumbled.

"You don't need to say that out loud. If you think it, I can pick it up fine. I get your point, though. Look, I'll see what I can do on my end. But you – your goal right now needs to be getting yourself fixed up. Either track down whatever did this to you, or find someone else who can help you do that. Understand?"

Mel rolled her eyes. _Yes, I get it, thanks,_ she thought. _Not like I wasn't trying to figure stuff out on my own._

"Yeah, yeah. Now let's get to work."

As soon as the voice faded from her head, Mel heard the telltale noises of destruction from around the corner, where the human she'd been following had disappeared to. She peered down the hallway. The human and the insect were fighting it out with another human and another Pokemon – this human was tanned, lean, and tall, with red-brown hair and wearing athletic clothes that looked easy to move in; her hands cut through the air as she made rapid signs. Mel could pick up some of them – mostly cursing – but the human was just too quick for her to catch everything. The Pokemon was almost as tall, and it had a gaping mouth, outfitted with wide, crushing teeth, and it was covered in pipes that extended out from its body. It physically grabbed the insect, hurled it into a wall, then blasted it with a nearly-visible wave of sound that was heavy on the bass. The insect collapsed to the ground and the human in gray returned it to its Pokeball before fleeing.

Mel watched the human go. The human in gray and the human with red hair were setting off in different directions, and they both registered somewhere in Mel's head as important. After a moment's deliberation, she followed the latter.

* * *

"Ah, Miss Izzy. You've returned." Hyacinth looked up from the table they stood in front of. They were in what looked like it was at one point a breakroom, albeit one that was uncomfortably cramped; now, the only remnants of that former life were a pair of ancient chairs, a table with a tattered cloth laid across it, and a countertop bearing nothing but a broken coffeepot. Hyacinth had spread across the table a paper with an intricate diagram drawn across it with tiny, deliberate strokes.

"Yes. Back," Izzy signed as she shut the door behind her, completely oblivious to the Ditto that slipped in with her. Her gestures were as sharp as ever, but her expression was equal parts downtrodden and frustrated. "Not that I'm making much progress. What is our purpose here, anyway?"

"Why, surely that's obvious!" Hyacinth exclaimed. They blew across the diagram, showing the layout of the hideout insofar as the two of them had mapped it out, drying the ink. "Our goal here is, first and foremost, to rescue our imperiled colleague. Following Miss Rylan's extraction, we can then proceed with whatever we determine our next steps to be."

Izzy collapsed in one of the rickety chairs and kicked her feet up onto the table, carefully avoiding the map; her Exploud crouched down beside her and closed its eyes. "All the grunts I found, I crushed. But her Ditto – he's still our only clue so far!" Izzy paused her signing to point at Repeat, who sat on the table, staring down at the map and showing no signs of listening to the conversation.

"This is true," Hyacinth said, their hand to their chin. "Though I'm naturally quite relieved to see him in one piece, I had rather hoped that finding Repeat would have yielded more… helpful results. Perhaps the recent events that he has been forced to undergo have traumatized him. After Dozer got knocked out, my thoughts were that perhaps Repeat could transform into her and keep up the fight, but I'm afraid that did not pan out. Even worse, he might have fallen victim to the power of the Sinnoh guardians, but without Miss Rylan, we have no way of finding out. That said, if you keep up the pressure on the Neo Rockets, we're certain to come out ahead. After all, there can only be so many of them in this place."

"The Neo Rockets. They have a healing machine here. You saw it. The grunts can keep coming. Eventually, we will be worn down. Don't trust using it myself. Who knows what it does?"

Hyacinth slowly turned to face Izzy, their eyes narrowing. "What are you suggesting, Miss Izzy?"

"We will be forced to retreat. Either now or later. The smart move is to leave now. Regroup. Come back with reinforcements. Smash them once and for all."

"Miss Izzy!" Hyacinth's eyes lit up with flames. "You cannot seriously be suggesting that we abandon Miss Rylan to her fate here. We scarcely know what's happened to her _now_ , much less what could happen to her by the time we've marshaled our forces and returned. Why, we could be greeted with the visage of a brand new Neo Rocket grunt!"

"If we get beaten, then it'll be worse." Izzy let out a ragged breath and rolled her wrists, giving her hands a moment of rest. "Nobody saves Rylan. Nobody saves us. We fall into their trap too. Bad time all around."

"Go if you like, then. I refuse to leave this facility until Miss Rylan has been safely rescued."

Izzy lowered her feet from the table and stood up, stretching her arms above her head. "I'll be back as quick as possible. Keep yourself safe until then." Flanked by her Exploud, she bolted out of the room, slamming the door shut after her. As when she had entered, she didn't see the Ditto escape out behind her.

 _They're both looking for someone named Rylan,_ Mel thought as she watched the human disappear. _I don't know who that is, but they sound familiar… I guess there's nothing for it. I'll keep on this human's tail for now._

Meanwhile, in the breakroom, the moment of calm that followed Izzy's departure was short-lived. As Hyacinth pored over the map, jotting in quick notes here and there, a figure materialized out of the shadows in the corner of the room, where nobody had seen her. She was small, with an elfin frame and a face to match, and she dressed like she'd heard about the concept of owning clothes that looked nice and fit well and decided that she wanted nothing to do with that. "Hiya, gumshoe," she said. "How's tricks?"

Hyacinth jumped, then held their hand to their heart when they placed the voice. "Ah, Miss Nia, it's just you. I do wish you would announce your presence a little less suddenly. I fear that you'll give me a heart attack. What can I do for you?"

"I just wanna check on my favorite private eye," Nia purred, craning her head over Hyacinth's shoulder to examine the map. "How's it going with sneaking around the base? Finding out lots of juicy gossip?"

Hyacinth gently pushed Nia off. "Miss Nia, I am aware that you are my client, but surely by this point you understand that I do not wish to comment on the information I gather until I have concluded my investigation. As I recall, we have had this conversation multiple times."

"Can I help it if I'm curious?" Nia said with a wide grin.

"Miss Nia." Hyacinth let out a long-suffering sigh. "Is there or is there not something I can help you with right now? As you may have surmised, circumstances are presently rather dire, and I would recommend you leave through whichever avenues you took to get in here in the first place."

"Okay, okay, fine, I get your point," Nia said. She clapped Hyacinth on the back hard enough to knock their glasses loose. "I'll get gone. I just wanted to say I think you made the right choice sticking around even when your friend took off."

"Really?" asked Hyacinth after a confused pause.

"Mm hm! You see, Mel is here, and she's in trouble, just like you were saying. She's going to need help, and quick-like, when she comes to, so to speak. Best to have someone like you on the ground who can give her a hand. Plus, after that, I get the feeling there's gonna be a big fight coming up, and, well, Mel's not great at the whole battling thing, is she?"

Hyacinth nodded absently. "You're not incorrect, I suppose. This does bring up something I've wondered about for some time, Miss Nia. You clearly have a way of gathering information on your own. Every time I see you, you have something new for me. That, and you always seem to know where to find Miss Rylan. So why is it that you needed to hire me to gather information on Neo Rocket and Genesis?"

No answer came. Nia had already disappeared from the room.

"I wish she'd stop doing that," Hyacinth muttered. "I didn't even hear the door open."

* * *

It didn't take long for Mel to lose track of the human she was following. Her body felt like it couldn't move fast enough to keep with up with her thoughts. _I dunno how Repeat does it_ , Mel thought.

 _Wait. Who's Repeat, again?_

"Hey, are you still there?" It was the voice in her head, its identity still on the tip of her tongue. "I think I have an idea."

 _Well, go ahead. Not like I got anything better._

"There's a door ahead and to your right. There's psychic power coming off of it. I bet there's something big in there. Something important. Might be worth checking out."

 _Sounds good to me._

The door in question was ajar, and Mel could feel a pressure coming out of it, just like the voice said. The presence of a powerful mind— _no_ , Mel corrected herself, _more than just one._ The room beyond the door was some sort of surveillance booth; a bank of monitors against the far wall displayed scenes from all throughout the building. Before Mel could look over them in any detail, she found the source of the psychic presence – or, more accurately, they found her.

They were superficially similar, with the same pixie-like bodies and long, slender tails, and they converged on Mel from opposite sides of the room. _Nobody else here,_ Mel thought, _so they must be coming for me. They look familiar, but…_

Then the two Pokemon fired on her, twin beams of sickly green energy. In the split-second that Mel had to look at their faces before she jumped out of the way, she could tell that they almost looked… regretful.

The attacks kept coming, alternating back and forth between energy beams, orbs of inky darkness, and psychic bludgeons that plowed through the air. It was all Mel could do to compress and twist her body this way and that, narrowly avoiding every strike that she could. Even the ones that just barely grazed her hurt more than anything she could remember feeling, making her head spin and her whole body scream in pain.

Then Mel saw them.

On the desk below the rows and rows of monitors, there were two Pokeballs, colored in various shades of gray. A pair of shattered memories drifting through Mel's head abruptly connected, and she realized what she needed to do. _They're being controlled,_ she thought, ducking under another ray. _They've been given commands by the people in gray. And it's because of those Pokeballs. So that means…_

Mel clambered across the room and pulled herself up onto the desk. The Pokeballs were too large for her to be able to handle, but… She smiled. For the first time since she'd woken up, she'd come up with a plan that wasn't 'wander around until something happens,' and it lit a fire inside her. She slid around behind the Pokeballs and ducked as far down as she could.

The two Pokemon took the bait, just as she'd hoped. They both shot at her, one with a psychic wave, the other with one of those dark spheres that felt bone-chillingly-cold to the touch – and the Pokeballs took the brunt of them. Mel still took the rest of the blows, but the important part was that the Pokeballs weren't as resilient as she was, and they shattered into bits under the stress of the attacks.

Mel pumped a pseudopod into the air. "Yes!" she squeaked, her heart soaring in her chest-analogue. She slunk off of the desk, trying to ignore how much everything hurt, and stared up at her two attackers. "Hey," she called. "You two okay? Are we about to start brawling again or not?"

They both looked at her. One of them had had its eyes closed for the entire fight, but now… now its eyes opened, slowly, inexorably. Mel couldn't stop herself from watching, and when she could see its eyes in their entirety, an explosion in her mind sent shock waves through her.

Her name was Mel Rylan, and she remembered everything.

Mel let a relieved breath hiss out of her mouth. "That was a trip," she said. "I take it we're good, then?"

Uxie and Mesprit both watched her with identical faint smiles on their faces. "Yes," said Uxie, "we are 'good.' We owe you our thanks, human, both of us. A moment's weakness on our parts cost us our freedom, and since then we have been drawn into these humans' terrible schemes. You have returned our liberty to us."

"Think nothing of it," Mel said, waving a pseudopod in the air. "Though, uh, gotta admit, the Ditto thing is throwing me. What happened while I was out?"

"A simple thing to explain," Uxie continued. "While the human who calls herself No.2 was traversing your memories, some other humans, ones associated with the Genesis organization, launched a surprise attack, intending to abduct you. They used a psychic Pokemon to attack you, and that, combined with the memory manipulation No.2 had me performing on you, overloaded your own psychic powers and kickstarted your latent abilities."

"My latent…? Never mind. Look, can you change me back? I dunno how Repeat handles not having arms."

"Oh, surely you don't need us to do that," Mesprit said, its eyes bright and shining. "You've had the capability to do that all this time! And not just because you we wearing the guise of a Ditto, either!"

Mel frowned. "Okay, can one of you explain what's going on a bit better? Because I get the feeling I'm missing something pretty important here."

"Certainly. As I said, your latent abilities were brought to the foreground by the psychic assault you endured," said Uxie. "From what I understand, the seal on those abilities were already weakened by a set of items that the Unown tasked you with collecting – items that all bore relation to transformation."

"Wait, wait." Mel held up a hand. "Those items were just so I could talk to the Mew-child."

Mesprit shook its head, an oddly human gesture on a Pokemon only vaguely human-shaped. "Oh, no, that's not it at all."

"Correct. You had no need to do so," Uxie said. "After all…" It paused for a moment.

Mel craned her face up.

"You are the Mew-child."


	18. No One

Septimus Reus, prolific author and connoisseur of being attacked by legendary Pokemon, left no topic un-notated when it came to recording his thoughts. "Don't ever underestimate the good that a really long pause can do," he once said after a particularly close brush with a Heatran. "Think about pauses. Lulls. If there's a pause, that means that nothing is happening. And if nothing is happening, that means that nobody is, at that moment, trying to kill you. Take a breath. Collect your thoughts. Whatever happens in the future will happen, but, in the present, you can calm yourself."

It was an unusual passage from Reus, who rarely ventured into the realm of self-help philosophy. Most of his writings riffed on the theme of "why did I choose this life for myself, what was I thinking, I didn't even know a human could break that many bones".

There was a pause while Mel, faced with both two legendary Pokemon and an uncomfortable truth, tried to get her verbal feet under her. However, nobody was, in fact, trying to kill her, so the moment was a marked improvement on her last several days.

"That's nonsense," Mel eventually said. "How can I be the Mew-child? I've talked to it before. Plus, it's in the name. Child of Mew. A Pokemon. And I'm a human." She glanced over herself before adding, "Usually."

Mesprit smiled, a tender gesture on something that could liquefy all of Mel's internal organs by thinking about it. "What evidence do you have that you are, in fact, a human?"

"Really?" Mel furrowed her brow, and for the first time, she appreciated how much of a Ditto's body that really took up. "I mean… I'm human. That's my evidence. My evidence that I'm a human is that I'm a human."

"Do not antagonize the poor thing," said Uxie, letting out a breath and rapping Mesprit's chest with its twin tails. "She has been through quite enough. Yes, Melanie Rylan, you are human. That much is not in question. However, I am curious as to why you think the Mew-child could not be a human as well."

"Um. Well." Several answers crossed Mel's mind, and she knew for sure that she didn't dare say a single one of them aloud. "All of the possibilities there are kinda… not good, right?"

Both Uxie and Mesprit let out peals of quiet, chirping laughter. "I told you she would think that," Mesprit said. "You owe me a berry."

"So I do." Uxie held a paw to its chin, a faint smile visible on its face. "Be not worried, Melanie Rylan. The answer is not what you think. However, it is not our place to say more."

"Aww, but I want to see how she reacts," said Mesprit with an exaggerated pout.

"Did you forget, Mesprit? There is much work we must do before we leave this place. Many humans here have fallen before our abilities. We owe it to them to set things right."

"I suppose so." Mesprit rolled its eyes and approached Mel. "Before that, though, you need to assume your true form."

Mel's eyes widened. "My… true form? That sounds…" She backed up a few paces. "Is this going to hurt?"

"Not at all." Mesprit's and Uxie's gems began to radiate a pale red light, one that Mel found herself surrounded with soon after. She felt her body rising from the ground, her limbs lengthening, her shape in general becoming more defined. The light grew so painfully bright that she had to screw her eyes shut…

…and just as quickly as it had started, it stopped. Mel opened her eyes again and looked down at her hands.

A pair of human hands, tawny-skinned with five fairly human fingers each, were what she saw.

Mel quickly looked over herself. "Wait, so my 'true form' was…"

"How quickly she forgets!" Mesprit said, giggling.

"Melanie Rylan," said Uxie, gently resting one of its tails on her shoulder. Mel could feel psychic power emanating off of it, as consistent and unignorable as tinnitus. "It is as we said. You are human. You are also the Mew-child. There is no contradiction here. However, while there is more to say, it does not fall upon us to say it. I expect you will meet your progenitor soon."

"You mean… Mew?"

Uxie nodded slowly. "That is correct. And when you encounter Mew, I believe you will have a lot to discuss. Be at ease, Melanie Rylan. Your journey is nearly at an end. Now, we have a task to which we ought attend."

"In fact…" Mesprit glided through the air towards the doorway. "I believe we have someone to start with right outside the door."

"Oh?" Uxie followed its sibling as they left the room. "Well! It appears so!"

"What—what are you—" came a familiar voice, before falling silent.

Mel's ears twitched. She knew that voice. She'd heard it every day for years upon years. "Repeat!" she called.

There was a pause. Then…

"Chief!"

Right outside the room, in the hallway, Mel found Uxie and Mesprit, floating in the air above Hyacinth Harley, who, judging from the pen and notepad in their hands, had been taking notes. At Hyacinth's feet was a familiar Ditto, with a familiar gleam once more in his eyes. Mel dropped to her knees and had barely opened her arms before Repeat leapt into them. "You're okay, Repeat, you're okay!" she said, a lump in her throat appearing even as a knot in her stomach faded away. The two legendary Pokemon exchanged a knowing look with each other and flew away.

"Aw, boss," Repeat said with a wide, beaming smile, "don't get too sentimental on me. I might start thinking you actually care about me or something." But he nuzzled up against her cheek, the gelatin texture of his skin comforting to her. "I'm glad you're still kicking too, boss," he said quietly. "I thought for a little while there I wasn't going to see you again."

Mel lifted her glasses and wiped at a mist that had built up in the corner of her eye. "They erased your memory, Repeat. Mine too. Even if we'd found each other, it'd be like… like…"

"Like we'd be gone forever."

"Yeah."

Hyacinth cleared their throat. "Far be it from me to interrupt a reunion as touching as this one, but I think we would be better served conducting it anywhere that isn't this hallway. Shall we leave?"

"I don't think we can, yet." Mel slowly stood as Repeat took his normal spot on her shoulder. "Uxie and Mesprit said that they're going to help all of the Neo Rockets here. Get them their memories and stuff back. We need to make sure they get out of here okay."

"Ah, so that's what your conversation was about," Hyacinth muttered, jotting a few hurried notes down on their notepad as they and Mel began tracing Uxie and Mesprit's path. "I see. I could only understand your half of it, I'm afraid."

"How long were you eavesdropping for, anyway?"

"I take umbrage with that term," said Hyacinth, crossing their arms. "But if you must know, I saw a Ditto enter that room back there and fight the two legendary Pokemon that just left, then the Ditto turned into, well, you. From there, I could hear one side of a conversation, and based on what I heard you saying, I would guess that it had something to do with you being, perhaps, the Mew-child."

Mel stopped in her tracks. "How'd you figure that one out?!"

"Oh, it was only a little bit of deduction." Hyacinth waved a hand dismissively. "It was a theory I had been considering, though not seriously, for some time, ever since the Unown directly called you the Mew-child when we encountered them."

"What?" Mel blinked as she thought back to the message she'd received in the Tanoby Ruins. The Unown had, in fact, just said 'Mew-child' when getting her attention. And, she realized, so had the psychic call she'd gotten back at Rock Tunnel, trying to catch the Magby – _that was probably the Unown too,_ she thought.

"On top of that," Hyacinth said, "I realized the items that the Unown were talking about both related to transformation, a skill that Mew was rumored to possess – the Upgrade was a tool used to evolve Porygon, a Pokemon that can change its own type, and the Aerodactyl fossil was, of course, on display with its Mega Stone."

"But what about all of that 'creature of past and future' stuff? They were hitting that pretty hard!"

"I have to admit, I haven't quite figured that one out yet. It's entirely possible that the Unown made it up in order to make it less obvious that they were talking about you, as well as to you." Hyacinth shrugged. "Who can say? Maybe that, too, will become apparent in time. Either way, back then, I considered it a wildly unlikely theory, so I said nothing about it. But now, based on what I observed, the pieces seem to fit together. Your reaction confirmed it for me." The lenses of Hyacinth's glasses gleamed in the harsh fluorescent light. "Q.E.D., as they say."

"Well, fine, smarty-pants." Mel stuck out her tongue, and Repeat smacked her on the back of the head. "Any other stunning conclusions that you want to dazzle us with?"

"As a matter of fact, I've been working on this fantastic thesis about canned tomatoes—"

"Subject. Mel. Rylan." The voice was cold and oozed venom, and it slid out of an open door ahead. The door bore a single number on it: '1'.

"That's her," Mel hissed. "No.2. The one who put me under."

Hyacinth readied Dozer's Pokeball. "She shall not find us unprepared."

"The audacity you have," No.2 continued, slinking out of the doorway. "First, you escape your confinement. Then you disappear before we can finish erasing your memories. And now, now that I have personally driven off those _damned_ Genesis reprobates, I find that you stand before me, your memories intact. But even with all that in mind, with all that has been done to you here, you do not even have the common decency to flee."

Mel raised an eyebrow. That was not how she had been expecting that sentence to end.

"You press forward with your 'friend' and your 'companion'," No.2 said, emphasizing her words with a nasal twang. "I _heard_ what you were talking about, Subject Mel. I know that you are the very creature we have been hunting all along. And knowing that, you still choose to defy me – to stay in our base. To _challenge_ me. Listen to me very carefully, Subject Mel." She stalked closer and closer to Mel until she was inches from her face. "Do you know who I am? Do you _know_ what I've _done_?"

"Do I care?" Mel grumbled. "Get out of my face!" With a violent yank, No.2 grabbed Mel's collar, her grip surprisingly tight. Hyacinth made to release Dozer and Repeat very nearly jumped onto No.2's face, but Mel held up a hand. "No. She clearly has something she's just dying to say."

"My name was Terra Ryder," No.2 hissed. "I know my name. Do you understand that? I _know_ my _name_. That is forbidden in this organization. But why should that apply to me? I made this organization what it is. Neo Rocket is everything it is because of me. We would be nothing – nobody – if it weren't for my guidance!"

"And yet you're just number _two_ in the group," Mel said, a smile playing across her lips. Sweat was running down her back, but she sure wasn't going to let No.2 rattle her, not again.

No.2 let go of Mel's collar and stepped back. Her pupils had shrunken to tiny points, and her breathing was becoming more ragged. "Just… just number two? Is that what you think, Subject Mel?" A wisp of a laugh escaped her mouth, and she put a hand to her forehead. "I know. I know! For you to really understand, you'll have to… You'll need to…"

"She is clearly not all right, Miss Rylan," Hyacinth whispered. "We should leave."

Mel shook her head. "Not before we help everyone else get out," she whispered back.

"You'll need to meet him," No.2 said, as if nobody had spoken. "Yes… that should do it quite nicely." She threw her left arm out, and a remote slid out of her sleeve into her hand. "No.1?" she called. "No.1? I am requesting your assistance." Her fingers flew across the remote control, and a dull humming echoed out from inside the room labeled '1'. As it grew louder, Mel saw what it was coming from: a motorized wheelchair that was slowly exiting into the hallway. The man seated in it was all sharp angles, gaunt and bony. He wore a gray suit that had countless holes worn into it, and what little hair he had left was silver and thin.

His head lolled to the side, his eyes unfocused. A line of drool trailed from the corner of his mouth.

Mel looked at him, blinked, and looked back at No.2. Hyacinth's pen flew over their paper. "I wondered as much," they murmured.

"Do you understand?" No.2 growled. " _This_ is No.1. A withered husk of a man with nothing in his head. He thought to subject me to his whims once, but he failed. Do you hear me, Subject Mel? He. Failed. He was useless from the beginning. He had the legendary Mew in his grasp, but it got away from him. He tried to erase my memories, but he didn't get it quite right. And so I turned the tables. I wiped his mind over and over, time and again, until there was _nothing left_. The man that once called himself One – No.1 – is no one. He is _nothing_. _This_ is what happens to people who cross me, Subject Mel. I take away everything from them. Everything they hold dear, right down to their very identity, is ripped from their fingers. You will be no different, Subject Mel. You and the power at your disposal will be mine. Do you hear me, Subject Mel? _Do you?_ "

Mel sniffed. "Yeah, I hear you. So what? What're you gonna do about me? What's your next move?"

"Uxie! Mesprit! To me!" No.2 called with a snap of her fingers. "These will be Subject Mel's last conscious moments!"

Footsteps rang out across the metal floor behind No.2. "Somehow, I doubt that," came another familiar voice.

Mel's heart leapt. "Janine!"

It wasn't just Janine. She was flanked by Blue and the other gym leader from Johto – _Bugsy, that's it_ , Mel realized – as well as the other, now former, Neo Rocket grunts. Uxie and Mesprit hovered above them, wearing impish smiles.

"Hiya, Mel," Janine said with a wink. "Owe you one, don't I?"

Blue frowned and looked to the side. "So do I, even though I don't want to admit it. Uxie and Mesprit explained some of what happened. Man, Red's gotta be wondering where I went to. I was supposed to meet him for a trip to Galar a month ago."

Mel felt No.2's emotions reverse course. "Wha—what's happening?" No.2 asked, her eyes wide. "How did—"

"We are freed from your grasp, human," Uxie said through a psychic wave that Mel heard directly in her mind. "We shall do your bidding no longer."

"And now you're… oh, how do the humans put it?" Mesprit put its paws behind its head, making a show out of considering the answer. "Ah, yes, I remember. 'Proper screwed.'"

No.2 swallowed. "Oh."

"Yes, human," Uxie said. "Oh."

Its eyes opened.

After three seconds that lasted three lifetimes, No.2 fell over, slumped across No.1's wheelchair, her eyes blank.

Mel focused her psychic senses. The manic energy that had been pent up within No.2 and gradually spilling out was completely gone.

* * *

"This gray uniform is doing nothing for me. I need to get back to Fuchsia and find my black outfit."

"You know, Miss Janine, they say that gray is actually better for blending into the night; pure black clothing tends to stand out more since very rarely is it actually pure black outside."

"Yeah, thanks, Hyacinth. Look, if Janine wants to wear the hot ninja outfit, she's allowed to."

"What was that, Mel?"

"Um, I said if you wanted to wear the ninja outfit, you could."

"Right." Janine laughed. "Look, Mel, I really do have a lot to thank you for. Hey hey hey, maybe after Blue and I are finished sweeping this place, we can get together, have lunch or something. My treat, of course."

"I'd like that," Mel said, trying to hide the pleased shiver that ran down her back. "If you find any Pokemon around the base that need a home, by the way…"

Janine pointed at Mel and clicked her tongue. "Rylan Family Pokemon Shelter. You know it." She looked over Mel's shoulder at Hyacinth, who was trying to not get in the way and failing. "But now I'm sure you've got stuff to handle. I don't know the whole story, but I get the feeling you've got this under control. C'mere." She grabbed Mel's shoulders, then pulled her into a tight hug. "Be careful, Mel. And thanks again."

Mel hugged her back. "Take care of yourself, Janine. I'll be in touch about that lunch when I'm back in town."

"I'm going to hold you to that."

As Blue and Janine turned the corner, Hyacinth met Mel's eyes. "I expect that settles your mind somewhat, Miss Rylan."

"You have no idea. I still can't believe we just pulled this off. Neo Rocket is just… gone."

"And now," Hyacinth said, "that just leaves Genesis that threatens you."

A picture of Degree Absolute's sneering visage filled Mel's mind. "Yeah," she said quietly. "I guess that's what we need to figure out next."

Hyacinth flipped a few pages back in their notebook. "As it happens, I have some idea where Degree Absolute may be. There've been reports of people moving large amounts of machinery into an abandoned warehouse on One Island."

"Their base," Mel said.

"Yes. Whatever their plan is, I suspect they are putting it into motion."

"So we should go interrupt them. And if we do it right, maybe we can stop them once and for all."

Hyacinth looked up at Mel, their eyes shining. "What do you say, Miss Rylan?"

"Hyacinth…" Mel glanced at Repeat, who nodded. "Let's go crack some heads."


	19. Interlude: New Moon

In a different time, in a different place…

…but in a time inching closer and closer to the present…

Moon woke up.

She didn't immediately know where she was. Harsh lights buzzed overhead, and she couldn't move her arms or legs. The bed underneath her was thin and uncomfortable, and a persistent, dull ache ran through her back. Her mouth was dry, and her throat felt like cotton balls had been shoved down it one by one.

She felt simultaneously exhausted and like she had slept for years.

Not long after her eyes opened, people swarmed the room. Humans in long white coats, their faces unfamiliar, lifted her hands, strapped bands around her wrists, and stared at esoteric patterns that formed on nearby monitors. A thermometer appeared under her tongue and, after a few moments, disappeared just as suddenly. Moon's eyes drifted towards the door of the room, where an egg-shaped Pokemon that had, appropriately, an egg in its pouch watched the proceedings with an expression of wide-eyed concern.

One of the humans ratcheted Moon's bed into something approaching a sitting position, and her head swum. He opened his mouth, and noises crawled out like spiders. The lights above pulsed and throbbed in time with red-hot bullets that ricocheted around the inside of her head.

Moon clenched her eyes shut and visions danced in front of her.

A man, stern, with a face that was all sharp angles, binding her arms together, tinged with the colors of pain.

Snow, cold and biting, blowing in through a window, nearly obscuring a sign on a rusted metal wall. The only words she could see were 'degree' and 'absolute'.

A bubblegum-pink Pokemon of indeterminate shape, looking up at her from her arms and smiling. Moon's mind filled in the name: _Pete_. Longing filled her chest. _What happened to you, Pete? Where did you go? I miss you._

Another pink Pokemon, nearly white, with an inquisitive cat-like face and a long slender tail. This image, this face, dwelled in front of her mind's eye for far longer than the others, and the sight of it made her stomach turn. _It knew,_ Moon thought. _It saw me. It did nothing. It saw me, and it did nothing to help._ She wasn't even sure what it was that the Pokemon was supposed to help with, but she knew that she had been in pain, in trouble, and it had only disappeared after finding her.

Moon couldn't leave the bed for what felt like another lifetime. She only barely listened to the people around her. "Dissociative amnesia," one of them said. "Protracted fugue state," said another. Moon didn't know what any of it meant, and her mind distanced itself.

Eventually, Moon went home. At least, the two people with her called it 'home', but they also called themselves 'Mom' and 'Dad', so Moon didn't know how much stock to place in them.

She didn't know them. She didn't know this place called home. She didn't even know the name they called her – it wasn't Moon, though that didn't feel right either.

And so, with little fanfare, Moon disappeared from both their home and their lives.

Nobody ever saw Moon again.

* * *

A woman with no name wandered the streets of Vermilion. It was far away from where she had come, but she didn't care. She was slender, almost gaunt; when it came to feeding herself, she didn't care about that either. Her hair, once a shimmering jet black, was now pale white, well ahead of her age. She wore the same clothes she had arrived in town in, with only the addition of a ragged amethyst-hued coat and a pair of well-worn steel-toed boots that she had found at a shelter. They were enough to keep her warm during the long nights, and that was all that mattered to her.

Dark circles lined her eyes. She barely slept. Whenever she closed her eyes, that feline visage appeared in front of her, as if mocking her. She was no closer to understanding exactly what happened, but every time she saw the face, her teeth grit a little more. She had grown to hate it as time went on, that creature that represented the day everything was stolen away from her, right down to her memories. Even crueler, of the few memories that she had held onto, one was of Pete.

She wished she had forgotten him too. Remembering him hurt too much.

She had no destination, no goal; her feet guided her with no conscious input from her head. Still, it did not surprise her when she ended up in the town library. Very little surprised her anymore. The library was quiet, it was warm, and nobody there paid her any attention – which was how she liked it. She could pick a book off the shelves and read it cover-to-cover before leaving; it provided her with an escape from her own head that, while momentary, was still a welcome relief.

Her hand moved of its own volition, tracing patterns across the spines of the books that sat on the shelves. She pulled one free at random and brought it to a nearby chair, one that threatened to swallow her as soon as she sunk into it.

She opened the book without even reading the title.

A familiar catlike face stared back at her from the first page. She nearly jumped out of the seat before flipping back to the cover.

It read _The Mythological Mew_ , by Tertia Reus.

She blinked. A memory had just snapped into place. She remembered the name of the creature whose gaze she couldn't hide from. _It was Mew_ , she thought.

Eager to remember more, she delved into the depths of the pages.

Hours passed. The book zigzagged across a range of topics, from the scroll depicting runic illustrations of Mew surrounded by ancient symbols for birth and death to the theoretical studies suggesting that Mew could use any technical machine it would ever be possible to make. One chapter even focused on the violent clone of Mew that had killed its creators before disappearing into the darkness of Cerulean Cave.

Her eyes, though, fell most heavily on the chapter titled, simply, 'The Mew-child'.

"Some will claim that the Mew-child is only a myth," Reus wrote. "However, I know that its existence is factual – because I have met it. It was only once, and it was under circumstances that I never wish to repeat, but I can personally verify that the Mew-child is real.

"I was only a young girl when it happened. The war was reaching its zenith, and humans and Pokemon alike were dying every day. My father had long since been killed on the front lines, and my mother had disappeared – no doubt a casualty of the war as well. I was alone in our home, with no idea of what to do or where to go. Someone began trying to break the door down, yelling from the other side for me to open up or face the consequences. I couldn't very well comply, of course, but I didn't have the presence of mind to try to escape – I was paralyzed with fear.

"So I did the only thing I could think of. I screamed.

"Not even a moment later, I heard a blast outside, and the person trying to break into my home suddenly stopped. Everything fell quiet. Then the doorknob turned, and, as if the lock weren't even there, someone slid inside.

"It was a Lombre. I had only seen that type of Pokemon once or twice before, and they weren't native anywhere near where I lived. It closed the door behind it, and gave me what I'm sure was supposed to be a disarming smile. Then it spoke.

"'Are you all right?' it asked. It didn't say these words out loud, mind you. It spoke directly into my head. Lombre's only flirtation with psychic powers as a species is the move Zen Headbutt, so I immediately knew that this Pokemon was not what it seemed. I told it that I was scared but I wasn't hurt, then I asked it what it had done.

"'I only ensured that you would be safe,' it said, and it almost looked rueful. It didn't go into more detail, but frankly I was afraid to ask. It sat with me, and as odd as it sounds, its presence was calming. And so we began talking. I got the impression that it didn't get much of an opportunity to just talk to others. That was how I found out that this Lombre was, in fact, the scion of Mew.

"Naturally, I asked it how a Mew gave birth to a Lotad, though since I was young the question was more akin to 'your papa must have been a Ludicolo then.' The Mew-child smiled – again, an unnerving expression on a Lombre – and told me information that I am certain it had never told anyone else.

"The Mew-child is an odd mix of legendary and mundane, born from one parent mythical and one not. As such, it spends its life in the form of an average Pokemon – with a few divergences – but upon its death, its spirit persists and it reincarnates in the form of a different Pokemon. From what the Mew-child told me, it could be any Pokemon at all; the fact that it was at that time a Lombre was proof enough of that. But no matter its form, it retained a few remnants of its parentage: psychic powers and the ability to transform. The transformation is no more impressive than that of, say, a Ditto, but its psychic abilities are incredibly potent. Make no mistake, this creature deserves the title of 'mythical' every bit as much as its sire does – but its close ties to the 'mortal' world, for lack of a better word, place it in constant danger, moreso than Mew itself. Invariably, people come after the Mew-child, trying to take its power for themselves; invariably, despite its resistance, the Mew-child dies as a result, though not without taking those who would threaten it down in the process. In short, when the Mew-child acts to the full extent of its powers, nobody – not even itself – lives to tell the tale."

Wheels turned in the woman's head. She'd never heard of this 'Mew-child' before – though it wasn't like she could remember much anyway. She stood and closed the book, but before she could shelve it, a paper slipped from inside the back cover and drifted to the carpet.

It wasn't a loose page – it was a scrap of notebook paper, torn in half. On it, in blue pen, someone had drawn a quick sketch of a Mew floating in a bubble and written underneath it a few hasty sentences: "MEW is DIVINITY. MEW is the BEGINNING AND THE END. MEW is PAST AND FUTURE." An address followed, almost as an afterthought.

The woman read the note a few times over. The feline image in her head superimposed itself over the drawing, and she grit her teeth. _I wish I could meet the person who wrote this_ , she thought. _They don't know what Mew did. For all of its power, it left me to die. I may not know much, but I know that._ The paper crumpled in the palm of her hand. Without knowing exactly why, she slipped the book into one of her coat's inner pockets.

* * *

The woman found herself in front of a run-down hovel of a house not far from Vermilion's port. The sea breeze stung her eyes with salt, but she welcomed it. She was feeling _something_ again. It didn't matter what it was, but she could feel it in her chest, a spark of life that, if protected, could swell into a roaring flame. Ideas bounced around the inside of her head, joining and rejoining each other as vague shapes of plans began to form.

She knocked on the door. After a moment, it opened just a crack, and a baleful eye peered out. "Yes?"

"I, ah." The woman held up the crumpled paper. "I found the note you left."

That was all the person on the other side of the door needed, and the door flung open. "You did? I thought nobody would ever see that!" he exclaimed, a smile lighting up his weathered features. He was ancient, with creases upon creases lining his leathery skin, and the amount of hair on his face more than made up for the lack of it atop his head. He was hunched over almost double, bracing himself on the doorframe for support. "Come in, come in!"

Everything in the house was coated in a fine layer of dust, from the yellowed windows to the spotty countertops. "Can I get you something to drink?" the man asked in a voice that belied his age.

"No! No. I'm fine," the woman said, trying to ignore visions of dusty teacups full of dusty tea.

"Suit yourself." The man's grin gleamed in the dim light. "What should I call you, by the way?"

The woman opened her mouth, then closed it again. She didn't know, exactly. None of the names that anyone else had called her had felt right. Then she remembered the words on the sign from her memory. "Degree," she said. "Degree Absolute."

"What a name! And, since you came here after finding my note…" The man hobbled over to her and knocked her playfully on the arm. "You must be very interested in Mew, yes?"

"You could say that." It was the truth, after all.

"I see, I see! Mew must have really changed your life!"

"No question about that." Degree wasn't sure what it was, but she felt that it was important not to lie to him. She would answer his questions honestly, but it wasn't her fault if he wasn't asking the right questions.

The conversation continued into the long hours of the evening, though the term 'conversation' was generous – the man was more than happy to spin stories of his youth and his encounters with Mew with Degree only offering occasional noises of assent and confirmation.

"This has been quite enlightening," Degree finally said during a lull, standing up and brushing off her coat. "I'm afraid I must be going, though." She'd not told him about what Mew did to her; somehow she didn't have the heart.

"Ah, well. Thank you for spending time with an old fool like me," the man said. "Here. Take this with you." In one shaking hand, he held a small black notebook, bound with string. "Contact information for other people like us. Those who believe in the divinity of Mew. It would mean the world to me, knowing that our mission continues."

Degree nodded. "Thank you." She gently took the notebook and flipped through it as she left the house. The wheels were spinning ever faster.

She could find these people – them, and more.

She could band them together.

She could sway them, over time. It wasn't that much of a jump from 'Mew is divine' to 'its offspring is not.'

Then, they could find the Mew-child.

The corners of her lips curled upwards. When they found the Mew-child, they would find Mew. And then…

And then.


	20. Absolution

"Hey, Hyacinth."

"Yes, Miss Rylan?"

"I thought the owner of the Seagallop ferries had already repaid your favor."

"That is correct."

"But you managed to scrounge up another private boat for us to use."

"I did, in fact."

"So, what, the Seagallop dude just owed you another favor out of nowhere?"

"Now, now, Miss Rylan. It's nothing like that." Hyacinth peered over the railing at the water, through which the boat was cutting an impressive wake. "For one, this isn't even a Seagallop ferry."

"Huh?" Mel joined them and leaned over until she could see the name painted onto the boat's hull, being careful not to disturb Repeat, who was dozing in her bag. "The S.S. Cactus? I guess that explains why this one's so big compared to the others."

"Indeed! This was, at one time, a small passenger ship that sailed the Hoenn region. But it sank several decades ago due to mysterious circumstances."

Mel shook her head. "Mysterious circumstances, huh? Scourge of the seas."

"Then," Hyacinth continued, "when Greater Mauville Holdings wanted to use the location of the wreck as a site for their Sea Mauville project, they worked out a deal with the Devon Corporation wherein Devon would salvage the wreck, clear the surrounding area, and get a share of the profits from Sea Mauville. Of course, I scarcely need to say what became of Sea Mauville."

"Yeah, I already know all that," said Mel, who didn't.

Hyacinth eased back off the railing. They needed their hands to properly gesticulate their explanation, which already had more details than Mel ever wanted about Hoenn's maritime history and corporate politics. "Nonetheless, Devon successfully retrieved the S.S. Cactus and spent no small amount of time and money repairing it until it was, if you'll pardon the expression, ship-shape. Even though they salvaged it before either of us were born, it was only recently that the reconstruction was finished."

 _One of these days, I'm going to learn to keep my questions to Hyacinth narrow and focused._ "That explains why this ship is sailing – though I gotta say, at no point until right now was I worried about that – but I'm really more interested in why we're on it."

"Certainly!" Hyacinth pointed one gloved hand upwards. "Naturally, I had to make sure you understood the intricacies first."

"Naturally," Mel echoed.

"All I had to do was call in a favor with the president of Devon Corporation. He was more than happy to let us use this ship; it was in dock in Kanto and didn't have another pending charter at the time."

"Huh." Mel arched her eyebrows. "Musta been one heck of a favor you did him."

Hyacinth waved a hand. "Not really, to be honest. All I did was deliver a letter and a package for him. He tried to give me one of their communication devices as compensation at first, but I had no need for it."

"So he settled on just owing you a favor, then." Mel pursed her lips and fell silent for a moment, watching the waves pass by. "You do like your favors, huh."

"I think you can scarcely argue with my results, Miss Rylan," said Hyacinth. "After all, they've gotten me this far."

"I guess so. Hey, what about all those favors you've been storing up from me?"

"Oh, don't worry about those. I already cashed those in by borrowing Repeat while your memory was erased."

"Oh, right. I guess that didn't amount to anything, huh?"

"Such is the way things go. Anyway, moving on," Hyacinth said, sitting down in one of the luxurious deck chairs and flipping through their endless notebook, "there're a few items you probably ought to know before we make it to land. First, I took the liberty of contacting our mutual acquaintance Miss Izzy prior to our departure, under the assumption that more help would be better than less."

"Let me guess," said Mel, taking a seat nearby. "She immediately struck out on her own."

"Correct. I had suspected that she would do so, but I figured there would be no harm in trying. Moving on, I also have spent some time recently looking into the background of Genesis' leader."

Mel shuddered. "Degree Absolute."

"One and the same." Hyacinth pulled a pair of weathered photos from their pocket. "Curiously, Degree appeared on the scene out of nowhere – I could find no reference to her outside of her tenure with Genesis. However, I found something promising when I searched the missing persons records from around the date of her first appearance." They held the photos up, and Mel craned her head in to see. One showed a woman, gaunt, with pale white hair and an uncaring expression; the other showed the same woman as a young girl, with a sparkle in her eyes and hair as dark as the night.

"That looks like her," Mel said thoughtfully. "What'd you find out?"

"Not much. She was in the hospital for some time, and then disappeared shortly after being discharged. Her parents filed a report, but nobody was ever able to find her. Not surprising, since the next time she showed up it was in an entirely different region. Based on this, I suspect some form of trauma-induced psychogenic amnesia may be the culprit – her extended medical care and sudden disappearance line up with other such cases. Her parents reported that she went by the nickname 'Moon', though she obviously doesn't anymore."

Mel gingerly took the photos in her hands. "Huh. Good to know, I guess. You mind if I hang onto these? Never know when they might come in handy."

"As you wish, Miss Rylan."

* * *

"Boss." If Repeat had teeth, he would have been gritting them.

"Hush, Repeat. This could go south easy, and I don't wanna get distracted."

"No, boss, I think this is worth distracting you over. The way it's looking to me right now is that you're trying to spy on Genesis by doing the exact same thing that got you found out the last time you were here."

Mel let out a sigh. "No, Repeat, I'm not doing the exact same thing."

"Do you want to explain how? Because you're on the roof of their hideout, looking in through a rusted hole."

"But it's not the _same_ rusted hole. Remember? The old one fell out under us."

"Ah, yes," Repeat said drily. "I'd forgotten."

"Besides, this time Hyacinth's gonna be backup if we need it. And we're not just going to watch, either."

The warehouse was largely the same as the last time Mel and Repeat had visited One Island, save for one of the holes in its roof being much larger and more Mel-shaped. There was no charismatic speaker pontificating to an enraptured crowd this time; instead, there was only a mishmash of machinery near the head of the room and four figures nearby. They were far enough from Mel that she couldn't make out any details about them, except that one of them was wearing a familiar purple coat and two more were slumped in a sitting position on the ground. The fourth was the most active, darting here and there through the mounds of metal and giving them form.

With a tight grip on the edge of the hole, Mel lowered herself into the warehouse, dropping onto a stack of crates that shook as she landed but thankfully didn't fall. As soon as she did, though, she knew something was wrong: it felt like a part of her mind had just disappeared. Her psychic sense no longer worked; once she'd crossed the threshold, some sort of block had wrapped itself around her head. Mel kept her eyes fixed on the quartet on the other side of the room. None of them turned to look at her. _They don't know I'm here,_ she thought. _Then this isn't something they aimed at me. It's for some other reason… they're trying to block someone else's psychic power. Which means…_

"Boss, are you good?" Repeat whispered.

Mel nodded and shook the thought out of her mind. _Time to focus._ She clambered down the stack of crates and crept forward, keeping cover in between her and the humans she was rapidly approaching. Once she could hear their conversation, she stopped in her tracks.

"Progress report?" asked Degree Absolute, a thread of ice undercutting her serene tone.

"I ain't got much farther than the last time ya asked me that!" said the figure who was running around – it was Bill, Mel realized with a start. She squinted in their direction and tried to make out more detail.

Metal debris littered a full quarter of the warehouse, but in the center of the mess were two pods, each the size of a human, that were connected by cables as thick as Mel's torso. The two figures that were slumped over were both leaning against the pods, bound and gagged with tattered rope and cloth bearing an uncomfortable amount of oil stains. One was unconscious and the other alert, watching Degree with an unreadable expression. Their identities became obvious on a closer look: the unconscious one was Izzy, while the other was Nia.

 _Why am I not surprised to see_ her _here?_ Mel thought.

"I'm afraid I must remind you that we have no time to waste," Degree said. "Plus, remember, the sooner you finish your device, the sooner your assistance will no longer be required."

Bill rolled his eyes but redoubled his efforts. "I dunno why you want me buildin' one'a my prototype transporters," he muttered. "Can't swing a Meowth without hittin' one'a my updated systems nowadays. Coulda just bought one'a them, but no, you had to go and kidnap me. Whatever gets me outta here and back home quicker…"

Degree only smiled in a way that didn't quite reach her eyes.

"Fine, fine, it's just about done anyway. You're gettin' your machine," Bill continued, adding "scarier than Team Rocket" under his breath.

The clicking of Degree's boots cut through the stagnant air as she cleared the distance between her and Nia. "And then there's you," Degree purred, undoing Nia's gag. "You and I have crossed paths many times, haven't we? You even disguised yourself as a member of my flock for a while. But your incursion here cannot go unchallenged – I will not tolerate spies. And to think that you would have escaped me once more if that headstrong trainer and her Exploud hadn't charged in and distracted you."

"Lemme go!" Nia hissed, straining against the rope. Her movements were interspersed with wincing, like her head was hurting. "You got no reason to do this!"

"Oh, is that so?" Degree crouched and ran a finger up Nia's chin. "Everything I've set up for today was for one purpose. The psychic dampeners lining the building, abducting Bill to get his machine, all of it was to find Mew."

Nia froze.

"And now," Degree said, "much to my surprise… Mew, you've simply presented yourself to me right away."

Mel took in a sharp breath. _Huh._

"I'm… I'm not…" Nia stuttered.

Degree stood up and adjusted her gloves. "Oh, don't bother to deny it, Nia. Not much of a pseudonym either way, was it? You might as well have just named yourself 'the noise cat Pokemon make.' But here you are. Mew. In the flesh, so to speak. And we didn't even need to capture the Mew-child to get to you."

"But the Mew-child is here anyway." Mel darted out of her hiding place as Repeat slipped into her bag, her head low and her elbow out in what would have been an impressive tackle if Degree hadn't weaved out of the way. "You're not keeping all these people here any longer."

"Well! If it isn't Melanie Rylan! This is quite the reunion today, isn't it?" Degree said, her eyes narrowing. She caught a punch Mel threw and shoved her backwards. "And – am I understanding you right? _You're_ the Mew-child? How enlightening! As it stands, you're almost right! I'm _not_ keeping all these people here for much longer. As soon as Bill finishes this machine, he's free to go, and he can take that interloper with him. You can even go too! The only one I need here… is her." She nodded at Nia. "That's all! Surely you can't begrudge me that. After all I've been through," she added with an icy smile.

Mel glanced at Nia. "What's she talking about?" she asked, taking a step towards her.

"I…" Nia grimaced and looked down. "I dunno—"

"LIAR!" Degree threw her arm out, and her fist resonated against the metal of the pod. "You know _exactly_ what happened." She stalked closer, her footsteps suddenly uneven; Mel jumped in her way before she could get to Nia. "I don't remember anything, Melanie. Did you know that?"

Mel didn't think it would have been a good idea to mention that Hyacinth had suspected that exact possibility.

"Something happened when I was younger. Trauma. My memories, my life, my partner… they were all taken from me. I was _dying_. And this… this _creature_ ," Degree spat, "saw me there, in the cold, and it _left me there_."

"I—I didn't!" Nia cried. "You don't understand!"

"What, exactly, do I not understand?" Degree said quietly. "Because you didn't help me, I lost everything… I even lost Pete!"

"Pete?" Mel muttered to Repeat, who'd squirmed out of her bag and back onto her shoulder.

Repeat shrugged. "I'm just as lost as you are."

"You don't get it!" Nia said, her eyes wide. "That's me! _I'm_ Pete!"

Everyone in the warehouse fell silent, even Mel and Repeat, who recognized the moment as striking even if they didn't know why. It was eventually broken by a low chuckle, which grew into full-on laughter. "So Pete was you?" Degree said, her tone equal parts amused and angry. "Pete was… Mew? That changes everything, doesn't it?"

Nia smiled, her eyes gleaming. "Yeah, see? I'm still your partner! There's no need for all'a this!"

"Oh, no no no, Pete. Nia. Mew. Whatever you want to be called. This makes everything _worse_." The word flew from Degree's mouth like a bullet, and Nia took a strained breath. "My _partner_ , the Pokemon that was more important to me than anything in the world… left me for dead. Only a legendary could be so… heartless. I should have known you weren't an ordinary Ditto to begin with."

 _Huh,_ a voice in the back of Mel's head said. _A Ditto named Pete. Now isn't that a coincidence?_

Nia struggled against her bonds even more, though the rope showed no signs of breaking. "Wait! I didn't give up on you! I was the one who showed that hiker where to find you! It's… it's 'cause of me that you were even saved in the first place!"

"Hold on." Mel held up a hand. "If you're gonna be having this argument past me, I need to get something straight. Nia, you're Mew?"

"I guess there's no point in denyin' it now," Nia said with a sigh. "Yeah. I'm Mew. And I'm sure you know what that means… kid."

Mel shook her head. "We can have that talk later. I wanna ask you about what Degree is saying. You're legendary, in every sense of the word. So why…"

Degree's smile broadened as she saw where Mel was going.

"Why did you have to go get someone else to help a kid in trouble?" Mel asked. "What was keeping you from just helping her yourself?"

"Well… I…"

"Go on, Nia," Degree hissed. "Answer the question."

Nia swallowed. "There was… there was a guy there, and he…"

"He…?" Mel prompted when Nia faltered.

"He had a Master Ball," Nia muttered, meeting nobody's eyes.

And that was when Mel knew. She knew exactly what had happened – and not because of any psychic power, but because she'd had the same urge all her life. "So… you ran," Mel said, more to herself than to anyone else. "You didn't wanna get yourself captured, so you bolted."

"I don't like to admit it," said Nia, "but yeah. Yeah. I ran away. I knew you'd understand, kid. I mean, the guy botched his first throw, but he mighta had more, and then I'd be real stuck. You saw what happened to Uxie and Mesprit—"

"No." Mel turned her back on Degree Absolute, facing Nia, shadows drawn across her face. "I _don't_ understand. Because you ran away from someone in trouble. I run away all the time, Nia. I'll own that. Repeat and I, we're not a well-oiled fighting machine."

"Guilty as charged," Repeat added.

"So we run from lots of stuff. But whenever someone's in trouble? When Janine needed us to stall Neo Rocket for her? When we all got cornered in the ruins? I'm not about to turn my tail. If someone needs help, I'm not going to just… leave them. Even if it means we get blown outta the water." Mel inclined her head towards Repeat, who morphed a serrated edge and made quick work of the ropes binding Nia. "That's the difference. Now, go and hide before she—"

Degree shoved Mel aside and punched Nia in the jaw.

Nia's feet left the ground and she reeled backwards, slamming against one of the pods.

"That's for what you did to me," Degree said, shaking the pain out of her fist. "But that's only the beginning. You're not going to elude me again. Because of you, I lost everything. And I'm going to make sure you lose everything too." She snapped her fingers. "Bill! Open it up!"

With one shaking hand, Bill, who had wisely decided to hide behind a pile of scrap metal, pressed a key on a laptop in front of him. The doors of the pods opened with a hiss as smoke billowed out. Degree hauled Nia up by the collar and bodily threw her into one of the pods, the door slamming shut immediately after. Nia jumped to her feet and pressed her palms against the glass set in the door, her screams coming out muffled through the metal.

Mel had hit the ground hard after Degree had pushed her, and Repeat was trying his best to get her back to her feet. Before she could get her head to stop spinning, Degree had jumped into the other pod. The machines hummed into life as sparks jumped through the air. Smoke filled the inside of each pod, erasing both figures inside from view; Nia disappeared banging her fist against the glass while Degree only showed a wide smirk.

When Bill had originally built the first prototype of a transporter more flexible than the ones made by Silph, it, to put it tactfully, had not gone as planned. He, like many young engineers, had decided to test the machine on himself, and were it not for the intervention of a passing trainer, he likely would have spent the rest of his life as a human-Pokemon hybrid. Which Pokemon it was depended on who was telling the story: some say it was a Clefairy, others a Nidorino. Bill himself, when asked, claimed he just got stuck inside a Kabuto costume.

That ill-fated prototype had been immediately dismantled, but the rumors persisted. It was that same prototype that Degree Absolute had forced him into building once more.

The machines quieted. Mel rose to her feet, trying to keep her balance. "What do we do, chief?" Repeat muttered into her ear.

"I… am not sure," Mel said. She lowered her center of gravity and took a deep breath. _No telling what's about to come out of there._

The smoke swirled around inside both chambers, and both doors slid open. Only one person stepped out.

It was clearly Degree Absolute, but, at the same time, it was clearly not. Pink, nearly white, triangular ears poked out from the top of her head. A thick tail extended from her back and wrapped around her legs, which themselves had bent, turning digitigrade. Her hands were knobbier, with only three fingers each and bulbous fingertips, and her face had pushed forward, approaching something feline.

"That's better," Degree growled, the words stumbling over each other as they left an unfamiliar mouth. She extended her arms and closed her eyes , then frowned. "Right. The inhibitors…" One eye cracked open, and with the flick of a finger, the sound of something shorting out surrounded them.

When it died down, Mel gasped; it was as if she could suddenly see again – her psychic senses were back, and Degree's mental presence in the room almost drowned her out entirely. It surrounded her mind, pressing in from all sides. It was interfering with her head, freeing memories that had long since been forgotten, and she could see…

Visions of a Lombre and a young girl in the middle of a war zone. A Klefki being surrounded by a group of people all wearing the same uniform. A Heatmor running for its life. A Cubone letting out a wave of psychic power and collapsing. And… and a Mew and something else, at the center of a barren island. They were talking, agreeing to keep something locked away in its mind, but promising each other that there would be a way to free it…

Mel grimaced. _Nia musta been good at keeping everything hidden, but Degree… she doesn't know how being psychic works yet… It's all too much…_

Degree rose into the air, her eyes glowing. "I did it," she said, and Mel couldn't tell if she was talking to her or not. "This was my goal. I stole everything from Mew. Its life, its memories, its very being. I took what it owed me."

Taking a step forward felt, to Mel, like she was walking through glue, with how oppressive Degree's psychic power was. "Seems to me," she grunted, "you're gonna have a lotta people wondering where Mew went off to. Or do you think your cult's gonna worship _you_ now?"

"Hm?" Degree looked up, as if she'd forgotten Mel was there. "Melanie. You're smarter than that. I do not care one bit what they think. What could they possibly do to me? I have… I have Mew. I _am_ Mew. But what…"

Something was coming. Mel braced herself.

"What do I do now?"

Mel and Repeat exchanged a look.

" _What do I do now?!_ " Degree howled. A psychic pulse blasted out of her, missing Bill and the pods by inches. Boxes and crates all the way to the warehouse's entrance were shredded into wooden splinters. "All this time, I… I had a goal! My goal was to make Mew pay! And I did! So why… why do I feel so empty? Like nothing's been fixed? What am I missing?!"

And Mel realized.

There were times when Mel could have sworn that Repeat knew what she was thinking, and the same was true in reverse. Of course, she was psychic, which made it easier than for other humans and Pokemon. Even so, reading minds wasn't something that Mel could normally do, but sometimes – rarely – Repeat's emotional state synced up with hers so well that they operated as one.

Mel and Repeat knew what to do.

They knew what Degree Absolute was missing.

Mel drew one of the photos she'd gotten from Hyacinth from her bag, looked it over, then, drawing on powers she'd only become aware of recently, she changed.

"This can't be everything," Degree muttered. "I must be able to do something else…" She looked up.

A young girl holding a Ditto looked back at her. She was small and she had thick raven-black hair, and her hefty glasses reflected the harsh fluorescent light.

"Oh… child." Degree cautiously floated a few feet forward. "You don't belong here, child. Are you lost? Do you know where… where your home…" She faltered, then dropped to the ground. "You… I know you."

The child watched her.

"I know who you are. Why do I know who you are?! I've never seen you before! But… you…" Degree extended an arm, her hand nearly brushing the child's face.

The child didn't flinch.

"Wait… you… your name is… Moon."

The child nodded slowly.

"You're Moon. No. No, that can't be right. Moon is gone. Why do I know that? Moon's gone. Because…" Degree's eyes widened. " _I'm_ Moon. I'm Moon. You can't be Moon because…" She fell to her knees. "I remember. I remember it all. I remember everything!" She backed up, her eyes losing focus. "What… what have I done…?"

"Now, boss!" the Ditto said. The child nodded and charged forward, changing shape – into a larger human – before tackling Degree. Degree fell backwards, landing inside one of the pods, and the door slammed shut automatically.

"Now, Bill!" Mel called, once again in her natural form.

Bill, never one to argue with people who could take his head off if they wanted to, tapped a key on his laptop. The machines whirred into life once more and electricity bounced around the inside of the warehouse.

When it died down, both doors opened. Inside one was Degree Absolute, kneeling on the ground, sobbing. The other…

Nia.

In the blink of an eye, Nia disappeared, replaced by a Mew; the Mew soared out of the pod as fast as it could towards the warehouse's entrance.

"No." Mel reached up and grabbed Mew by the tail. "You still don't get it, do you?"

"Kid! What are you playin' at?" Mew's voice projected into Mel's head, but it still bore hints of Nia's accent. "Lemme go! It's too dangerous here!"

"You're a legendary Pokemon! When are you gonna start acting like it?" Mel said, fire in her eyes. "You running away is what started all this, isn't it? So, what, knowing that, you're just gonna do it again?"

"That's big, comin' from you!" Mew hissed. It tried to tug its tail away from Mel, but her grip refused to relent. "I've been keepin' an eye on you all this time and I don't care what you said, runnin' is your thing too!"

Mel yanked Mew down to eye level. "Did you forget? I'm not disagreeing there. But I'm not about to hit the road in the middle of all'a this, like you were about to. Now you listen to me. This whole mess is your fault. So you're gonna fix it."

"How?" asked Mew, its eyes narrow. "Look, kid, we're family, but I gotta say, I'm not likin' how you're talkin' to me right now."

"I don't care if you like it or not!" Mel balled her free hand into a fist. "Are you telling me you can't think of a single way to make this situation better?!"

"Boss." Repeat's voice was calm and level, and it cut cleanly through the argument. "I think I got something." He climbed up to the top of Mel's head, where he could stare down at Mew. "You were Degree Absolute's Pokemon, weren't you?"

Mew shifted its eyes away. "Well, not _technically_ , but…"

"And was Degree Absolute right in what she was saying, that you disappeared right after she went through trauma?"

"I… I guess, but I just couldn't bear to face her again—"

"Well," said Repeat, "here's your chance. Degree Absolute remembers the kid she used to be. She knows all about the childhood she didn't get to finish. She recognizes everything that she's done since taking over Genesis. She's grieving. So you're going to help her. You're going to be Pete again for her. You're going to make sure she ends up better than she is now. And you're going to stay with her this time. Until she doesn't need you by her side anymore, however long that might take. And you're going to do it because she was your friend, and she needs help." He glowered, his expression fiercer than most Ditto could generally muster. "Understand?"

Mew looked over Mel's shoulder, at Degree, still collapsed in the pod. "I… I do."

"And," added Mel, "the two of you are also going to find the other people in Genesis and back them down from the ledge. I don't need them after me again."

"Can't I just get Uxie to wipe their memories?" Mew said with an exaggerated pout.

"No." Mel let go of Mew's tail, ready to grab it again at the first sign of Mew trying to bolt. "So do we have a deal or what?"

Mew sighed. "Yeah. We do. But only 'cause we're family, you know. Now can we be done here, kid?"

"I don't think so. Sit down. Or… hover down or something." Mel stacked a few planks of wood on top of each other and sat on it. "You and me, we got some talking to do. We're family, like you said. So what does that mean for me?"

* * *

In another time, in another place, there was a child.

The time was ages and ages ago. The place was a lone island that would eventually be named by the humans 'Birth Island'. The child was the scion of Mew – Mew and a mortal Ditto.

It was a special place to both Mew and its offspring, as it was there that the Mew-child was born for the first time. It lived its life, but as all mortal creatures did, it eventually died.

Its soul persisted, reincarnating into another creature. It lived. It died.

This process continued.

Eventually, though, the Mew-child stopped living full lives. It would be killed, or, worse, it would die trying to defend itself. Its reincarnations would happen faster and faster. As soon as the humans found out what face the Mew-child was wearing, they closed in.

And so, at this other time, on Birth Island, Mew and its child met.

They agreed that, for the first time, the Mew-child would reincarnate as a human.

Its memories, most of its powers, an entire facet of its being, would be locked away in its own mind, until the time came that the seal was weak enough for certain reminders to break it entirely.

Mew would watch it from afar, trying not to interfere. It was, admittedly, capricious, and only time would tell how well it kept that promise.

The Mew-child needed to keep living, free from the cycle of senseless deaths.

It was, and would be, the creature of past and future.

* * *

"…So that's it," Mew said, looking at the ground. "That's everything. Look, I know we're not on great terms right now, but I do care about you. I want you to be safe. You're my kid, kid."

Mel crossed her arms. "You got weird ways of showing it."

"Mm. I gotta admit, I'm worried about you, kid." Mew floated up near Mel's head and began making lazy loops around her. "I mean… people know about you now. You can't keep it secret forever." It watched over Mel's shoulder as Hyacinth finally entered the warehouse, immediately tending to the still-unconscious Izzy. "Every time the humans knew about you, you died."

"The only people who know are us, Hyacinth, Degree, and No.2. Hyacinth won't tell anyone, No.2 isn't an issue anymore, and you're gonna be keeping an eye on Degree."

"Plus," Repeat added, "I have a gut feeling that Degree's not going to be in a hurry to tell anyone about everything she's done."

"Still." Mew floated to a stop in front of Mel's face. "As long as you know, it's gonna slip out somehow. It always does."

Mel frowned, running the thought through her mind. "So what are you suggesting?"

"Hear me out. We get Uxie. We call in a favor. We erase your knowledge of being my kid from your mind. Lock everything back down." Mew spread its arms, pleading. "If you don't even know, that's the best camouflage. Or, failin' that, you keep yourself hidden away somewhere real hard to get to. Like Mount Silver! Only guy who hangs around there is this mortal trainer named Red, and he can keep a secret like nobody else. But we need to keep you safe, one way or another." It offered up a tentative smile. "So, kid? What do you think?"

No answer was immediately forthcoming. Mel stared up towards the ceiling and rubbed her temples. Eventually, she made eye contact with Mew again. "Okay," she said. "Here's my decision."


	21. Epilogue: As One

In his _Collected Journals_ , Septimus Reus had this to say about Mount Silver:

"First of all, the respective governments of Johto and Kanto need to stop bickering about whose jurisdiction this place actually falls under. It doesn't help that every map shows this mountain range in a different place – from just north of New Bark Town to just west of the Indigo Plateau. There really isn't enough here to warrant the enmity. I feel sorry for the Pokemon Center attendant assigned to work here; I can't imagine they see more than one person a day.

"With that said, Mount Silver is an incredible tourist attraction, if your idea of a vacation is endless forest, nigh-unclimbable mountainside, pitch-black caves, and the occasional hailstorm. Sometimes, you might get to see a display of diamond dust; I made it to the peak of Mount Silver on my birthday and was treated to that rare sight. It almost made it worth the five straight days of hail immediately prior.

"As a side note, if you're here trying to catch a glimpse of the legendary Moltres, don't bother. It shows up at Mount Ember just as frequently, and at least Mount Ember has a spa."

It was not hailing as Mel ran through the trees and tall grass, nor was Moltres anywhere nearby, but nevertheless it was still unmistakably Mount Silver – the eponymous peak rose into the sky in the distance. "Incoming, boss!" Repeat yelled, and Mel ducked to the left just as a blast of fire passed to her right, fizzling out harmlessly over a lake.

The fact that the lake was, thus, in front of Mel was not something she noticed until her relationship with said lake became markedly more intimate. Luckily, falling into the water was enough to deter the Rapidash from chasing her anymore, and it wandered away.

The more buoyant Repeat surfaced first and clambered back onto the shore, followed shortly by Mel. Accidental soakings were by no means new to them, and they had a procedure. First, Mel wrung the water out of Repeat – a sensation he described as being like "a really good full-body stretch" – then she started drying her own clothes.

A presence rustled in the bushes nearby, and Mel whipped around, holding her fists at the ready before realizing who it was. "Oh. Hey, Hyacinth. What brings you up around these parts?"

"Greetings, Miss Rylan! And to you as well, Mr. Repeat." Hyacinth bowed low and made a motion like doffing their cap without actually doffing their cap. "I find myself here on the search for leads in a new case!"

"A new case? Do tell." Mel collapsed onto a felled log, pulled a boot off, and dumped more water out of it than she thought could have reasonably fit in it in the first place.

"Indeed!" There was Hyacinth's notebook again, suddenly in their hand as they likewise sat next to Mel. "Understand I can't go into too much detail—"

"Of course."

"—but I've been hired by a certain former Viridian gym leader to find a missing former Pokemon League champion."

"Oh no," Mel said with no outward trace of sarcasm. "However will I determine who you're talking about?"

Hyacinth looked briefly sheepish. "Well, I suppose I could give you a hint. Their names may or may not be primary colors—"

"No, no, I follow. Don't worry. Keep going."

"Ah! Well then. Mount Silver is known to be one of this person's favorite haunts, so I rather thought I might find some clues here. I was just able to teach my dear Dozer Rock Climb, so I intend to scope out the mountain's summit."

Mel stretched her arms back and yawned. It was getting to be evening, and she was already worn out. "Good luck with all that. How's life treating you otherwise?"

"Thank you for asking!" Hyacinth beamed, and their glasses glinted in the setting sun. "I'm well. I've been consumed mostly by work, as you might imagine! Though I did run into Miss Izzy the other day."

"Oh yeah?"

"Yes! She initially tried to avoid me. I can't imagine why. I was able to chase her down though."

Mel cracked a brief smile at the thought of Izzy being cornered by someone half her size.

"Once she talked to me," Hyacinth said, "I found that she's returned to working with Professor Silktree. They'll be traveling to Sinnoh soon, to the Solaceon Ruins."

"Huh!" said Mel. "I guess they're heading into unknown territory. Why is that so funny?" she added when Hyacinth started laughing.

The two chatted for a while longer, with Repeat dozing off into an early night's sleep, before Hyacinth rose. "It has been lovely catching up with you, Miss Rylan," Hyacinth said, "but I expect I should be continuing my investigation." They approached Mel and helped her back up to her feet. "When can we expect to see you back in civilization?"

"Who knows?" Mel said, waving her hand dismissively. "There's a Poliwag out here somewhere that's hurting, but I haven't pinpointed it yet. I'm going to take a quick nap and start on the lookout again. But once I find it, I've got some medicine for it."

"Medicine? I thought you usually brought them back to the shelter."

Mel shifted uneasily. "Well… ever since all of that… _stuff_ with Genesis, I feel guiltier about taking a Pokemon out of the wild unless they really, really need it."

"Ah. You don't want to take it away from its family." Hyacinth tapped the side of what Mel assumed was their nose.

"Right. So I'll find the Poliwag, see how it's doing, talk to it a bit, and make the choice from there."

Hyacinth nodded. "A sound plan, I think. Best of luck to you." And with that, they were gone.

"What a coincidence, running into them," Mel said, smiling. "Small world, I guess. Ready to hit the hay, Repeat?"

The only answer she got was Repeat's snoring, which sounded like someone running a fan through gelatin.

"You've got the right idea."

* * *

Mel's dreams were usually pretty tame. Occasionally, she found herself late for school, or swimming in a lake with a mysterious figure underneath it.

This time, Mel stood in the sky. Nothing was above her, nor was anything below – only an endless expanse of blue and white. Her feet seemed to be on solid ground, though she had no idea how. Repeat was on her shoulder, but he, much like she wanted to be, was sleeping soundly.

Before Mel could dwell on it very long, a human appeared in front of her – at least, it looked like a human. The figure was smaller than her, with an elfin face and tattered clothing. "Ah. Nia," Mel said with more than a little ice in her voice.

"Kid," Nia responded.

Mel spread her arms out into the emptiness. "I figure this is your doing?"

"Yeah. Just wanted to talk. Izzat a problem?"

"Guess not." Mel sat on an otherwise-inconspicuous patch of air. "What's going on? How's life as Pete?"

Nia didn't answer right away. Her eyes, normally sparkling with mischief, were downcast. "It's… rough. Moon isn't doin' so hot. She didn't get everything back right away, you know. It came in stages. And every time she remembered something new, it was like another knife in her heart. The Moon I know, the kid, it's like she's fightin' for control with the person she became."

"Oh." Mel listened quietly. She had no sympathy for Degree Absolute – no matter what was in the past, the woman had still led a campaign to kill her. But… she couldn't stop herself from aching on Moon's behalf.

"Moon didn't turn into Degree Absolute overnight, you know," Nia said, sitting across from Mel and staring upwards. "The trauma ate into her. She left the only humans who really cared about her and wandered on her own, with no place for her to go. That does something to people. Then she surrounded herself with people who were more than happy to act on every bad idea she had…" Nia spun a finger around in a circle. "Feedback loop, y'know? And all'a that… it doesn't go away overnight either. I figured it'd help to get a change of scenery, so we left Kanto. Convinced her to talk to someone in Johto Social Services. Hopefully they can get her some help. Maybe someday she'll even wanna go back home."

"Look, Nia," said Mel. "I don't like that she's got it rough, but… she did try to murder me. Did you come here just to try and tug on my heartstrings?"

Nia shook her head. "Nah, nothin' like that. Just worried about you, kid. After you chose not to erase your memory _or_ hide yourself away, I keep wakin' up at night, thinkin' I'm gonna find out that some fool team got it in their head to take you down. You sure I can't convince you otherwise?"

"I already made my choice," Mel said. "I don't want to forget who I am. And I'm not about to abandon my family."

"I guess." Nia let out a pained sigh. "I just… I'm scared. I don't know how many more times I can take it, learnin' you got killed. And you, all on your own like this…"

"Don't worry, Nia." Mel looked at the Ditto resting on her shoulder. Repeat let out a soft snort and rippled in his sleep, and Mel smiled. "I'm never alone."


End file.
